


The If Sieve

by cest_what



Series: If Sieve [1]
Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M, Multiple Universes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-09
Updated: 2010-04-09
Packaged: 2017-10-08 19:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/78806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cest_what/pseuds/cest_what
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An If Sieve lets you see how things would have unfolded if somebody had made a different decision at a particular time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There is an excellent [podfic of this story](http://community.livejournal.com/amplificathon/793852.html) by aphelant, and a [Chinese translation](http://psychen16.livejournal.com/525.html) by psychen.
> 
> Thank you to my beta rigel_7.
> 
> Originally posted to [LJ](http://cest-what.livejournal.com/3934.html) March 2007.

The device sat on Draco's bed, denting the heavy green quilt into a rumpled dip. It looked a little like a Pensieve: a solid stone bowl filled with quivery silver liquid. But it was suspended between gleaming silver rings; three, intersecting at base and top. The rings were mounted on a square base and the bowl itself was held between the rings with about an inch of air between bowl and base.

"Are you sure it's not still broken, Draco?"

Draco rolled his eyes. He'd been talking about the sieve nonstop for the last two weeks. Only Crabbe would still have questions.

"No, it _is_ broken, but I've worked out how to get around it. I told you that. I have to do the arithmancy by hand, because the rings don't work anymore."

He felt a bit smug about that. The calculations involved were rather difficult. He doubted he could have worked them out at all without the practice he'd had last year in recalibrating the magic of the vanishing cabinet.

Although he wasn't going to think about that.

"I want you two to keep watch for me tonight."

Goyle looked up at that, an expression of alarm sweeping his face. He was halfway through tying his shoelaces into the complicated pattern he'd been perfecting since first year. He held the laces in place with his thumb as he looked at Draco.

"Do we have to Polyjuice as little girls?"

Draco grinned. "That was a brilliant idea, don't you think? I loved how Potter kept stopping and patting you on the head, like a complete dork. But," he waved his hand, "this time you won't need to, because using the If Sieve isn't against the rules. I just don't want to be disturbed."

He turned back to the gleaming sieve on his bed. He supposed it might have been against school rules to steal it from the Room of Requirement. But it had been shoved in there with the vanishing cabinet and all the rest of the junk because it was broken.

He shrugged. _Really, I doubt anybody's going to miss it._

"Are you sure it's going to work?" Crabbe asked. He'd been struggling with the Slytherin tie at his neck before the sieve distracted him. The two ends were looped together and then fell in a sad sort of tangle onto his chest.

"Yes," Draco said. "Sort of. Well, I tested it this morning between Potions and Charms. You know I told you every If had to be a real possibility — a choice the person might have actually made? Well, I put in one that was unlikely and the sieve spat it right out again. So I think that means that if I get it to accept the If then it will definitely work. Rather than trapping me inside forever, or something."

He'd put in: _If Lord Voldemort chose to open a bunny slipper emporium._ The parchment had been spat out in pieces, along with a bad-tempered shower of sparks.

He glanced at Crabbe again, who was looking worried about the _trapped inside forever_ idea, which apparently hadn't previously occurred to him.

"You haven't finished knotting your tie. Come on, we're going to be late for dinner."

Draco got Goyle to lift the If Sieve back into the chest at the foot of his bed while Crabbe scrambled with his tie. He warded the chest before they left.

Nott was slumped against the opposite wall when they came out, his arms resting on his knees. Zabini stood above him, his arms crossed and his shoulder blades pressing into the stone wall.

"_Finally_." Nott got to his feet. "That's the last time I let you lock us out of the dorm, Malfoy, I swear."

Draco smirked. "Admit it, Nott, you get off on being told what to do."

Nott made an obscene gesture.

"Theo?" Zabini had pushed through into the room behind them. "Do we want to know why they locked themselves in the dorm? Because Malfoy's bed covers are kind of mussed."

"Wanker!" Draco called.

Nott followed Zabini into the dorm, snickering.

"They're going to be even later than us," Crabbe said.

"Come on, then." Draco tugged his arm.

There was a little thrum of excitement in his belly as they hurried through the halls. He wasn't sure that he'd actually be able to eat tonight — not when he knew he'd be using the sieve after dinner.

If Sieves were designed to help you judge whether you'd made the right choice about something; everybody knew that. You wrote down the place and the time — the moment of choice — and then the _opposite_ choice to the one you'd made and watched what would have happened unroll like a memory in a Pensieve.

Draco had read up on If Sieves a bit, though, last year in the times where he'd been trying to distract himself from the growing panic over the vanishing cabinet. He'd found out that you didn't have to put in one of your own choices: it could be a choice made by anybody at all.

The arithmancy — which the silver rings were supposed to generate by themselves — narrowed the focus down to the thing or the situation that you actually wanted to see the effect on. Otherwise you'd likely find yourself watching the changed fortunes of the ant colony you stepped on, or those of the girl at the corner shop whom you forgot to smile at. Draco had had to work out how to write the equations that would restrict the focus to himself and Potter, since the rings were broken.

Apparently Crabbe was thinking about the sieve too. He frowned deeply as they walked. Eventually he opened his mouth.

"We still hate Potter, right?"

"Obviously."

"Then ..."

Draco sighed. "Look, it's ... complicated, alright? I just want to know if I'm right."

"That you and Potter could have been friends," Crabbe said, testing.

Draco winced. It sounded stupid like that.

"Yeah."

"But if we hate him, why would you want to be friends?" Goyle joined the conversation.

"It's complicated."

Crabbe pushed open one side of the big double doors to the Great Hall. The noise level went up by a factor of a hundred, a din of voices and clattering plates and yells and laughter. There were still scores of students milling around. Draco relied on Crabbe and Goyle's imposing bulk to clear a path to the Slytherin table.

People turned to watch them when they were elbowed out of the way. A few blanched and pulled away, frightened or angry; but most stared with avid curiosity. Everybody knew that Harry Potter claimed that Draco Malfoy had helped murder the Headmaster last year. Whether they believed it or not, the whole school was enjoying the drama.

The good thing about the stupid mess was that Slytherin House had closed around Draco like a solid wall against the rest of the school. Draco sometimes thought Slytherin house loyalty would trump even loyalties for or against the Dark Lord, if it ever came down to it.

"Potter's already there," Goyle mumbled in his ear; the surprisingly deep baritone that still startled Draco sometimes, coming from someone he'd known since they were four. He turned his head.

Potter was sitting with Granger and Weasley, all three heads buried together. It looked as though they were trying to be surreptitious about the conversation, but they were extraordinarily bad at it. They might as well have put up a screen with 'Important Quest in Progress: Do Not Disturb!' printed across it.

Everybody also knew that nobody was supposed to know that Potter and his friends were searching for something terribly important this year and even had permission from the Headmistress to leave school grounds if they got a lead.

Draco was deeply suspicious about the fact that the one time they'd done so it had coincided with a Transfiguration test. Although Granger had, predictably, arranged to sit a make-up test the next day.

Potter scratched at his neck, feeling the stare, and looked up. His eyes narrowed and darkened and ...

There hadn't been that much hatred there before, had there?

Draco shivered, uncomfortable.

Nott and Zabini squeezed into the space next to Goyle about ten minutes after the food appeared. Nott leaned around Goyle to talk to Draco, spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate at the same time.

"Tell me you three were locked away because you're working on some new scheme," he said. "Because Blaise and I are about to expire of boredom this term."

Draco gave him a slight smile. "Sorry," he said. "Secret."

Nott hesitated, scanning his face.

"Damn," he said, going back to his food. "I can't even tell anymore when you're saying that for real and when you're just trying to annoy me."

"Give over, Theo." Zabini rubbed his shoulder. "Honestly, let them have their little sex games in the dorm."

"You've already made that joke." Draco rolled his eyes. "It was even less funny the second time."

Nott reached too zealously for the pumpkin juice and almost toppled it. He grabbed for the handle just in time and found a more secure stretch of table for it.

"Is there some reason that Potter's staring at you?" he asked as he settled back.

Draco looked up. Potter looked as though he hadn't shifted his gaze since he first sighted Draco. It was still that stare of death — his expression so black and focused that Draco almost expected the ambient magic of the Great Hall to produce small thunder clouds.

"Potter always stares at me," he said, looking back at his plate. "He has this thing where he doesn't like me. I don't remember why. Oh, wait, there was something ... no, it's gone."

Goyle snickered.

Zabini raised his eyebrows. "You know, I think it might have been the Dumbledore thing, most recently. Which reminds me, is that what your latest scheme is about?" He stretched in his chair, luxurious as a cat. "Because you should probably be careful if it is. I don't think the school will allow you more than one dead teacher."

"That's true," Nott said, picking pieces of onion out of his salad. "Even Potter's only been allowed one actual death."

Draco scowled.

"Stop saying that," he said. "I didn't kill Dumbledore." He stabbed at his plate and Zabini laughed.

"Only you could find murder so funny," Draco muttered. "I swear, Zabini, you must have had the weirdest childhood."

Zabini shrugged. "Being able to see Thestrals was cool, though."

Draco shifted his food around his plate throughout dinner. He'd been right, he couldn't really eat; his stomach was jumpy and uncomfortable. He didn't have the heart to tear Goyle away before the pudding came out but he didn't think dinner had _ever_ been this long before.

Potter had gone back to his conversation with Granger and Weasley but he continued to lift his head every now and then and give Draco a black, suspicious glare.

Draco wondered what he was expecting him to do, exactly. How many teachers could he murder while sitting down eating dinner?

He bit his lip. _Not as funny as I meant it to be._

He snuck a glance at Potter the next time he went back to his Very Significant conversation. Granger seemed to be telling him off for being distracted.

He _didn't_ like Potter. Potter was a complete git. He didn't admire him or wish he had any of his qualities. But he — recognised something in him. He always had. There was something in Potter that spoke to something in him and it wasn't about admiration or having things in common, it was just about — that. That feeling that was almost kindred.

He couldn't get it any clearer — and he had tried. He was used to being able to talk to Crabbe and Goyle as if they were extensions of himself, to be honest, so it was frustrating to not have been able to express this. He was just sure that they should have been friends; so sure that he left every confrontation with a sick, angry feeling in his gut, no matter how trivial it was. This year — maybe because McGonagall wouldn't let him focus his energies on anything actually useful — he'd become increasingly fixated on the idea that they _could_ have been friends, if something had gone differently.

And, the part that he was barely admitting to himself: he secretly hoped that if he could see that they could have been friends, then maybe they kind of still could.

Possibly. In some way that wouldn't involve Draco ever giving Potter the opportunity to judge him unworthy a second time.

The If he'd chosen seemed the obvious one. It had poisoned his whole first month of school, after all, and made him completely lose confidence in his ability to understand people; as though suddenly the rules of social interaction had been changed and nobody had told him. He'd always intended to make loads of friends the instant he got to Hogwarts, but after the thing with Potter he'd restricted himself to Crabbe and Goyle, whom he already knew.

He let Goyle get about halfway through his enormous bowl of rice pudding before his patience finally gave out.

"Come on." He stood, adjusting his school robes. "Let's go. I want to go."

Goyle gave his bowl a longing sort of look but got up. Crabbe had already finished one bowl and had been casting around for the dish to serve himself another but he looked less disappointed to be leaving early. For Goyle, pudding was something sacred, whereas for Crabbe it was all about the volume consumed. Crabbe seemed to need about four times as much food as anybody else just to keep breathing.

Nott looked up as they left, his eyes narrowing in curiosity.

They picked up the sieve from the dorm and headed to the library. Crabbe carried the sieve under his heavy outdoor cloak. It wasn't exactly secretive but casting a Notice Me Not charm on it seemed over-the-top.

They found a desk in a corner of the library, overshadowed and mostly concealed by bookshelves, and Goyle set the sieve down. Draco took the parchment with his calculations out of his robe pocket and checked over them again. They were perfect, he knew they were; he'd checked them a dozen times already. He dropped the parchment through the silver rings and the surface of the sieve closed over them without a sound. Then he got a new piece of parchment and wrote: _If Harry Potter chose to accept Draco Malfoy's hand when he offered it on the Hogwarts Express in their first year at Hogwarts._

He dropped it between the rings.

The parchment sank into the silver liquid. The surface of the sieve rippled and turned a pearlescent shade of blue.

"Did it work?" Crabbe asked.

"Yes," Draco said. _Well. I think so._

He took his wand out of the pocket in his sleeve and extended it carefully between the rings until it touched the surface of the sieve.

The world tilted.

 

  
_If_   


He found himself standing on the gently rocking floor of a carriage on the Hogwarts Express. He expected it to be Potter and Weasley's carriage but apparently he'd come into the scene a little early. Only himself, Crabbe and Goyle were actually inside the carriage; all of them eleven years old and looking astonishingly young. The door was open and a couple of boys were hanging about it, laughing. The eleven year old Draco was in the middle of an impersonation of somebody. Longbottom, apparently, since he was miming a search for an imaginary toad.

Goyle was laughing so hard he nearly made himself throw up. Draco could barely believe they'd all been that young. Photographs never prepared you for Pensieve memories.

Just as in a Pensieve, none of the occupants of the carriage noticed that he was there.

"My own sweet Trevor, come home to me," Sieve Draco cried, clasping his hands together.

Goyle made little hopping frog motions with one hand, so helpless with laughter that he fell over onto his side on the long window seat. He grabbed his pumpkin juice just as it started to fall from its precarious perch on the seat and took a great gulp. He was still giggling, which meant he snorted some of it up his nose. Crabbe slapped him on the back.

"I don't think that's very funny," a voice said from behind the boys in the doorway. They swung around.

Granger — and god, her teeth really had been quite appalling back then — swung her bushy hair and sniffed. "Nobody's seen Neville's toad, you know. I asked Harry Potter but he didn't know either."

Sieve Draco's head snapped up. "Harry Potter's on the train?"

"I knew that," one of the boys at the door volunteered. Draco recognised him as a Ravenclaw from the year above him but couldn't recall his name. "The Weasley twins met him on the platform. They said he's in a carriage down near the end with their little brother."

"I heard that too," somebody else piped up. Draco looked over and recognised a very young and be-pigtailed Hannah Abbot, who'd come out of the opposite carriage and was hovering around the door. Slytherin never shared any classes with Hufflepuff so Draco didn't know much about her beyond that she usually looked like a startled and rumpled rabbit. She'd got rid of the pig-tails at some point since first year, though.

Sieve Draco was looking at her with a bit of a sneer, as though he didn't have much interest in learning more of her, if it came to it. "My sister said Fred Weasley said he didn't know how to get onto the platform and their mum had to help him. He didn't have any parents with him or anything."

"That would be because his parents are _dead_," eleven year old Draco said scathingly.

"He looked nice," Granger said. "He wasn't awfully helpful about looking for Neville's toad, though."

Sieve Draco ignored her. "Which carriage is he in, then?" he demanded of Abbot and the second year boy.

"The third from the end," Granger said. "He didn't have his school robes on, either, and neither did the boy who was with him. I think they should, don't you? Don't you think we'll get there soon? I'm going to ask the driver whether we will."

Sieve Draco pulled his robes straight with dignity and got to his feet. "Come on," he said to Crabbe and Goyle. "Harry Potter's really powerful, everyone says, so I bet he'll be in Slytherin like us. We should introduce ourselves."

Goyle hurriedly slugged the rest of his pumpkin juice. He got up, casting a mournful glance over the mess of crumbs and wrappers on the seat in case anything had escaped that he could eat on the way.

"Come _on_," Draco said. Crabbe gave a cry of triumph and dove at something just under Goyle's fingers. It was an unopened chocolate frog. He opened it immediately and stuffed it into his mouth, grinning at Goyle through the half-eaten mouthful.

"I'm going to go without you," Draco warned. "I might not even come back. I might stay with Harry Potter."

"Sorry, Malfoy," Goyle said, giving Crabbe a betrayed look as they fell in behind him. Crabbe just grinned again, munching happily.

The real Draco followed them out.

Watching them like this was surreal. He'd had a sort of notion that Crabbe and Goyle hadn't really changed over the years; but these overgrown, bulky boys trailing after his own excited figure were so ... comfortable and identical, somehow. It was as if they hadn't worked out yet that they weren't the same person.

He found that he was getting nervous as the young Draco, Crabbe and Goyle came up to Potter's carriage door. So far everything had been identical with his memories — although admittedly he didn't remember most of the details until he'd seen them. This was the bit that was supposed to go differently. Potter had to accept his hand. Draco didn't know if he could bear to watch the scene play out again if he didn't. He might go mad from not being able to break anything.

Sieve Draco pushed the sliding door open and stepped inside, Crabbe and Goyle immediately pushing after and flanking him on either side. Watcher Draco squeezed past them so that he wouldn't have to look over all their heads. He saw his younger self focus on Potter and his eyes widen a little as he recognised him. Potter was sitting alongside Weasley on the seat under the window, surrounded by an absolute mountain of sweets, pasties, wrappers and lined-up chocolate frog cards. Goyle's eyes widened in awe.

"Is it true?" Sieve Draco asked. "They're saying all down the train that Harry Potter's in this compartment. So it's you, is it?"

"Yes," Potter said. Watcher Draco noticed that he didn't seem entirely sure. He also didn't look all that pleased to see the three boys. Sieve Draco, he knew, was privately crowing over the fact that he'd met Harry Potter practically before anybody else had, even though he hadn't known it at the time. Potter looked at Crabbe and Goyle.

"Oh," Sieve Draco said. There was a proprietary tone to his voice. "This is Crabbe and this is Goyle. And my name's Malfoy. Draco Malfoy."

Weasley snickered, disguising it with a cough. Both Dracos looked at him in dislike.

"Think my name's funny, do you?" Sieve Draco demanded.

_Oh, come on,_ Draco thought privately. He'd snuck into Dumbledore's office in second year and had a look at the enrolment lists in an effort to work out who the Heir of Slytherin was. _I honestly don't think anybody with the combination 'Bilius' and 'Weasley' anywhere in their name has the right to scoff at 'Draco'._

"No need to ask who you are." Sieve Draco gave Weasley a superior look. "My father told me all the Weasleys have red hair, freckles and more children than they can afford."

Weasley flushed and Draco could almost see his younger self filing the reaction away for future use. He turned back to Potter, still defensive. "You'll soon find out some wizarding families are much better than others, Potter. You don't want to go making friends with the wrong sort. I'll help you there."

He stuck his hand out. The older Draco squirmed for him. The stupid idiot simply didn't understand how _badly_ this was going, because he was rubbish at reading people. He knew it wasn't turning into the immediate alliance he'd imagined between himself and the Boy Who Lived but he didn't really understand why Potter was frowning at him now, disapproval radiating out of almost every pore. And he didn't imagine, for one second, that he might be rude enough to actually turn down Draco's hand. That wasn't something people did.

And ... Potter didn't. For a moment it looked as though he would. Then he screwed up his face and took the offered hand. "I'm not going to be rude just because you are," he said with quiet righteousness, "but if Ron's the wrong sort then so am I."

He dropped Draco's hand and stared at him challengingly. Weasley also sat up straighter, fixing Draco with a very dirty look.

Sieve Draco hesitated. Watcher Draco held his breath. _This is what would have happened this is what this is what ..._

After a moment Sieve Draco shrugged. "Whatever." He leaned back against the frame of the sliding door. "Have you two decided what house you want to be in?"

"Not really," Potter said. He was still wary but relaxing a little.

Goyle had been staring in a more and more fixated manner at the mountain of food as the encounter went on. Apparently he'd become somewhat mesmerised, because without even seeming to know what he was doing now, he reached out and closed his fingers over a pumpkin pasty.

Weasley shouted in outrage at the same time that Goyle gave a howl of pain. He jerked his hand up. A mangy-looking rat was attached to his finger. He swung it wildly around his head until the rat flew through the air and hit the window.

"What have you done to him?" Weasley demanded, scrambling to pick the rat up.

"Done to _him_?" Sieve Draco cried. "Your rat's probably just given Goyle rabies!"

Potter got to his feet too. "It serves him right for stealing our food," he said. For some reason he seemed to be extremely worked up about that. "The greedy pig."

"Yeah," Weasley said. He was holding the rat in one hand now. It seemed to be entirely limp, folding at the belly, and Watcher Draco would have thought it was dead except that he could see the tail shivering as though ... _Wow_, he thought, _is it actually snoring?_

Goyle was flushed bright red and sucking on his finger. He looked mortified. Crabbe stepped up beside him, spreading his feet a bit and cracking his knuckles.

Sieve Draco zeroed in on Potter, almost shaking with rage. "You've got a nerve," he said. "Calling _him_ a pig." His clipped drawl was choked and roughened with anger. "You'd got enough here to feed an _army_. You could feed the entire _Weasley_ family on this junk. Well, we don't want your food anyway. Eat until you throw up and then roll in it, we don't care. Weasleys eat that way anyway. I might have thought your parents would have brought you up better, Potter, only ... oh no." He sneered. "They're dead, aren't they? You want to be careful you don't end up the same way, with the kind of company you keep."

Potter and Weasley both took a step closer.

"Say that again," Potter said, white faced.

Draco sneered at him. "You're not worth the bother." He looked at Crabbe, and at Goyle who was much less red now. "Let's leave the little orphan and his friend to make themselves sick."

He strode out the door. Crabbe and Goyle followed hard on his heels.

As the scene began to fade and Draco felt the whirling begin around him, he heard Potter say in a shaking voice, "That ... he ... I can't believe there's anybody I could hate _more_ than my cousin."

*

He opened his eyes, blinking and unsteady on his feet. Crabbe's face was far too close.

"Did it work?" Crabbe asked.

Draco took a step backwards and sat down at the desk. Goyle had settled on the other side and had apparently been amusing himself by changing the settings on the enormous red and gold watch his mother had sent him last year. They called it the Super Watch; it was Goyle's most prized possession.

"No," Draco said blankly. "Well, yes, I guess." He scowled, staring down at the surface of the table, where centuries of students had scored their initials with cutting charms. "It worked, only it didn't change things. Not really."

He met Crabbe and Goyle's sympathetic expressions — sympathetic even though they had no idea why he was doing this — and wanted to swear with disappointment.

He'd been sure. He honestly had.

*

"Mr Malfoy, I have told you, the Order does not delegate tasks to school students."

Draco took a breath and practised his patience. He tried a winning smile. McGonagall's frown deepened.

"You know that I'm of age now, Headmistress. Surely the Order needs every qualified wizard it can get?"

She arched an eyebrow. "And yet you are not qualified, Mr Malfoy. Not until you sit your NEWTs later this year."

_Damn. Walked into that one._

"I meant every capable wizard, Headmistress. You know that I could be useful in — in a lot of different ways."

The Headmistress looked long-suffering. "How many times have I told you no, Draco? There will be time enough next year for war, I'm sure. School is not the place."

"You know, somebody should tell Potter and his friends that."

McGonagall's face became impassive, as it always did when he brought up this — rather good, he thought — point.

"Mr Potter's position is regrettably unique, as I am sure you know. I'm afraid that I don't mean to discuss him." She shuffled the papers on her desk, which was her cue that she was about to dismiss him. "In the meantime, I believe you have a Herbology class in five minutes. It wouldn't do to neglect your studies, I think you will agree."

_Given that you have such an unexpected chance to complete them._ He knew that that was the unspoken end to the sentence.

"Incidentally, you really must stop inveigling your way past the wards into my office, Mr Malfoy."

He smiled politely but couldn't help shrugging as he left. He'd stop breaking in when she stopped making her passwords clan names. It was ridiculous: anybody with a copy of McGrath's _History of the Wizarding Scots_ could break in easily. He didn't think it made any kind of sense to choose passwords that were always of a kind.

His shoulders slumped a little as he waited on the moving spiral staircase. It was frustrating to have decided, for himself, which side he wanted to be on, and then be unable to do anything about it.

_At least the Dark Lord gave me a task to do._

Which he wasn't going to think about.

He reached the foot of the staircase and the gargoyle ground out of the way.

"Malfoy?" Furious green eyes met his as he ducked out of the stairwell and looked up. "What were you doing up there?"

He smirked. "Oh dear, Potter. Did somebody not tell you something?"

Granger put a hand on Potter's arm. "Don't get involved," she hissed sideways at Weasley and he closed his mouth with a snap.

"Does the Headmistress know you were up there?" Potter demanded.

Draco hesitated. "Well, I don't know. She can be a little distracted sometimes, don't you think? I'm fairly sure she noticed me, though."

He could feel three suspicious pairs of eyes on his back as he walked away.

"I just want to know what he was doing up there," Potter muttered from behind him and Granger murmured something soothing to him. Whatever it was it made Weasley yelp in outrage and furious whispering broke out.

Draco spared a thought for why they were all loitering about near McGonagall's office. No doubt something to do with their enormously important Quest to find ... whatever. He wished he'd said something to wind them up, now, while he'd had their attention. _You'll never find it, Potter, my father hid it far too well._ Something like that.

Maybe he should write to his mother, ask her if she'd have a word to McGonagall about letting him join the Order; or at least giving him something useful to do. She'd probably refuse, though. She'd been less than impressed when the Dark Lord had given him something to do.

He remembered the stark paleness of her face when Snape Apparated them into the manor; told her in brief, spare sentences exactly what had happened before Apparating out again.

She hadn't hesitated. She'd summoned a house elf and told it to send a trunk with all essential belongings of herself and Master Malfoy to an address on a small card she took from an inner pocket. Then she'd Apparated them both to France. She hadn't let go of Draco's shoulder at any point from the time Snape brought him to her to the time they Apparated out.

Snape's actions on the tower had obscured Draco's moment of weakness, or rebellion, whichever it had been, and saved him from immediate consequences at the hands of the other Death Eaters. It hadn't saved him from the Dark Lord's later disappointment, which Draco knew very well would have meant either death or a lifelong bondage and servitude.

Narcissa had been in the new Headmistress's office within half an hour, bargaining everything she knew about the Death Eater movement in return for Draco's pardon and protection at the school in the new year.

"Draco!" There were footsteps pounding behind him. "Malfoy, wait up!"

He turned just as Pansy caught him up, out of breath and with her satchel swinging wildly on her elbow. He noticed Bulstrode and Greengrass a way back. She must have run ahead of them to reach him.

"Hell, Draco, you could have waited," she puffed, annoyed. "I suppose you've just come from McGonagall's office, again?"

"Mmm."

 

"Wait a sec, I've got something in my sock."

She got him to hold still while she grabbed his shoulder and twisted one leg up, fumbling inside her black patent leather shoe.

"Since when do you run, anyway?" he asked. "I thought you were morally opposed to all forms of exercise? I'm fairly sure that's what you told me when I tried to get you to come to try outs this year."

She looked back up and scowled, intense and flushed behind the dark hair that had got mussed and was falling into her eyes.

"I am," she said. "Only _somebody_ wouldn't stop when I called their name. Aha!" She found the object in her shoe. She made a face at it and threw it away.

She put her foot back down and tested it. "There, it's gone. Did she refuse you again?"

"Yes."

"Cow," she said philosophically. She linked an arm through his elbow and tugged him into motion again.

"Did you do it last night?" she asked, her voice lower.

"Yes," he said again. He shrugged. "It didn't work."

"I thought you said you'd worked out the calculations!" She sounded personally betrayed by his fallibility and he smirked a bit.

"That part worked. But the — scene didn't go the way I wanted it to." He bit his lip. "I'm going to try again tonight, though," he said, deciding on the spot.

"You mean, with a different If-thingy?"

Pansy was the only person he'd told about the sieve other than Crabbe and Goyle. He hadn't entirely meant to but she moved like a steam engine when she thought it was worth her while. He remembered her determination when she decided that they were going to hang out in second year. And her insistence that he was going to keep her from looking like an idiot by publicly asking her to the Yule Ball in fourth year, since Nott wasn't even looking at her. (He also remembered the embargo she'd put on any Slytherin girl accepting an invitation from Nott that year, and his complete mystification over the way girls suddenly had something vitally important to do over the other side of the room if he tried to talk to them at any time during the lead-up to the ball.)

The only time she hadn't been able to wrangle a secret out of Draco had been when he was sneaking off every day to the Room of Requirement last year.

He dragged his thoughts away from that and nodded to Pansy's question.

"I've been thinking," he said. "The thing happened on the train because Potter had had Weasley fawning over him for an hour already, right?"

She shrugged. "Sure, okay."

"Which only happened because Weasley got star-struck because he was the Boy Who Lived."

"I'll bet _you_ only went to his compartment because he was the Boy Who Lived."

"Whatever." He waved his arm. "I just wondered what would have happened if he hadn't been."

*

Goyle brought an _Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle_ comic along this time and made a nest for himself with Crabbe's outdoor cloak against the foot of a bookshelf. Crabbe put the sieve down and stood back.

Draco checked his calculations again. He'd had to tweak them a little bit, since this time the choice-maker wasn't himself or Potter, but he was pretty sure they were right. He tipped the parchment in and then pressed a second piece of parchment flat and wrote: _If Lord Voldemort chose not to attempt to kill Harry Potter and his parents in the autumn after Harry Potter's first birthday._

The parchment floated for a moment and then sank, the surface changing from silver to blue above it. Draco touched his wand to the pearlescent blue liquid. He felt the jerk of the sieve tilt him off his feet.

 

  
_If_   


He had to blink a few times when he found his feet again. He'd half expected — he didn't know. Death Eaters in a field under a blood-red moon, maybe; or the Dark Lord curled in a high-backed chair with his snake.

Instead, a huge, crowded hall strung with evergreen branches and coloured ribbons stretched around him, thronged with witches and wizards in dress robes with glasses of juniper and strawberry wine. A babble of conversation — some polite, some genuinely happy — crowded up around his ears.

There was simply no way that the Dark Lord was here. Could he have messed up the calculations? Unless ... he thought he remembered reading that the sieve didn't always show the moment of choice itself. Not if there was a more optimum scene with which to show its results.

Given that he'd asked it show the effects on himself and Potter of somebody ele's choice that only immediately affected one of them and that when he was a year old, he supposed it had been silly to suppose that he'd see the Dark Lord in a black chair somewhere, weighing up the pros and cons of murdering the newest Potter.

He moved through the drifting crowds, a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of people. The uniform-pillowcases of the house elves he spotted weaving throughout suggested it was a Ministry event of some kind. A moment later he saw a long banner stretching across one wall. _Four Year Anniversary of the Defeat of the Dark Lord Voldemort_ was emblazoned across it, in tacky gold and orange lettering. He saw one or two people tipping their glasses to it as they wandered past.

That was cheering — that the Dark Lord could be killed at all, in any reality. He still wasn't sure what he was doing here, though. He made an effort to catch some of the snatches of conversation around him in case that would help.

"... knew that his days were numbered, of course," a fat little witch nearby was saying, waving her glass expansively and spilling a little of its contents onto her sleeve. "I always knew what was going on at the Ministry in those days because of dear Mildred and I remember telling her, 'Mark my words, dear, You-Know-Who hasn't a chance against that kind of opposition.' Why, it was ..."

Draco moved on.

"... so tiresome," a lean wizard in sky blue robes complained to the witch at his side. "And I suppose we'll hear the same speeches again this year, and the Potters and Joneses and all the rest of them will parade their Orders of Merlin over the podium. Honestly, Lavinia, couldn't you have a word in the Minister's ear about the benefits of putting the whole sorry business behind us and letting us off these infernal Remembrance events?"

The only interesting thing Draco could glean from that was that the Potters were alive, so apparently he really was in the right If.

"... very hush-hush about it, of course," a heavy-browed witch was saying to the small circle around her. "Very dark magic, I expect, and you know how the Ministry is about protecting that sort of information. But they say that the reason it took so long to kill him was that he had found a way to make himself near immortal. Broke himself up into little bits, they say — put his heart in Wiltshire, his liver in Dorset and who knows what he did with the rest."

One of the other women in the circle raised her eyebrows. "Why, it must have been like some kind of treasure hunt, to gather up all those. What a strange way to win a war ..."

Draco snorted. He could imagine the Dark Lord finding a way to make himself close to immortal — but honestly, did she imagine that removing his liver would _help_? Still, wandering through this world where Voldemort was really and truly gone — by whatever means — prompted a little shiver of longing in him. He wondered whether he should mention the liver thing in his own reality, just in case there was some kind of truth to it.

He lost his train of thought as he caught a glimpse of messy dark hair and a flash of glasses. The man with the hair and glasses was standing by a red-haired woman, who seemed to be laughing at something an elderly wizard near her had just said. It took Draco a moment to spot the smaller messy-haired person with glasses near their feet. He was scuffing his shoes against the floor and making faces at nobody.

Draco moved closer.

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind, Tobias," the red-haired woman — Mrs Potter, it had to be — said with a smile as he came up. The elderly man drifted away towards the long refreshment table along the far wall.

Potter — who looked to be about eight or nine years old — immediately stepped closer and tugged on her robes.

"I'm _bored_, Mum."

She rolled her eyes, ruffling his hair. "So am I, tiger, but we've both got to endure, I'm afraid."

Potter lifted his chin. "I _could_ have stayed home," he pointed out. "Even though Percy couldn't babysit these holidays, I could have stayed on my own. I'm not a little kid anymore, you know — I'm going to Hogwarts in two years."

She grinned, a little tiredly. "So you are. And you'll be smoking cigars and twirling your walking cane any time after that, old man."

Potter rolled his eyes at her. "Mu-um."

The elder Potter finished trading back slaps with somebody in ceremonial Auror robes. He turned back to his wife and son, absent-mindedly trying to put his wine glass into his pocket. Mrs Potter saved it before he could. He smiled at her, one of those you-are-the-centre-of-my-world-and-you-stop-me-making-a-fool-of-myself smiles.

"I'm bored, Dad," the nine-year-old Potter said, switching parents.

"Didn't I see Lovegood and his girl about, writing up a society piece?" Mr Potter asked. "Why don't you see if you can find her?"

Potter looked at him as though he was insane. "Dad," he said. "Luna's a girl."

Mrs Potter smirked and began adjusting the gold chain around her neck, which had got tangled in the neckline of her robe. Draco caught a flash of the distinctive shape and yes, it was an Order of Merlin. He couldn't see what class.

Potter Senior raised his eyebrows and said dryly: "I remember you two playing together when you were four. If she has any special girl germs, I imagine you caught them long ago."

"How about we get you something to eat," Mrs Potter interrupted. "I've been waiting for a house elf to show up but they seem to be somewhat overworked. James, do you think you could beat a path to the table for your lady love?"

Mr Potter swept her a gallant bow, making the nine-year-old Potter roll his eyes again.

"For you and Harry, my lady, I would venture forth to slay dragons and dark lords." He paused. "Or, er, I would have, if you hadn't got there first."

Mrs Potter leaned close to his ear as they turned. "It's probably not a good idea to send him off with Luna anyway," she murmured. "It took you weeks to convince him that there was no King of the Wrackspurts last time they played together."

Draco followed them as they moved through the thicker crowds towards the refreshment table. James Potter went first to forge a path through the throng for his wife and son, as he'd promised. Potter kept one hand on his mother's robes, tugging at his own stiff collar with the other. They were making their way back out of the press of people, triumphant with a tray of Pumpkin Pasties, two fresh glasses of juniper wine and a goblet of pumpkin juice for Potter, when Draco saw his parents. And himself, trailing at their heels.

The Potters saw them at the same time.

The expressions of both elder Potters froze over. A similar change came over Narcissa and Lucius, although given that they hadn't been laughing the moment before the effect was less striking.

"Malfoy," Mr Potter said finally. "And Mrs Malfoy."

Lucius inclined his head, coldly. "Potter," he said. His expression suggested that he'd just found something unpleasant on his shoe.

Seeing his father again — free, arrogant, composed — Draco was finding that it was all at once difficult to breathe.

Lucius didn't acknowledge Mrs Potter at all. Draco was confused by that for a moment — his father's society manners were generally impeccable — but then he remembered. Of course, she was a Mudblood.

Neither of the women bothered with a greeting. Narcissa gazed through the elder Potters as though she, personally, were living on another plane in which petty things like Potters didn't even exist. Potter's mother was fixated on Lucius just as her husband was, her eyes dark with dislike.

"I admire your grace, Malfoy," Potter Senior said. "To come here and play nice at an event celebrating your own master's downfall — well, it can't be easy for you."

Lucius looked down his nose.

"You will have your jokes, Potter. People of your sort are often nervous and ill-at-ease at affairs such as this, I understand. It requires a certain level of breeding to remain — graceful, as you say — in such an environment."

Mrs Potter made a sharp motion with one hand, quickly cut off. Her eyes looked dangerous, now.

"And yet it doesn't seem your proper environment at all, Malfoy," she said, a thread of viciousness in her voice. "I don't know how it is, but somehow when I think of you I can only imagine you in a dark field in a blood-spattered robe and mask. Isn't that strange?"

"Very droll," Lucius agreed, his voice a hiss. He seemed to have forgotten that he wasn't acknowledging her existence.

The boys at their feet seemed only peripherally aware of what was being said above them. Potter was staring at Draco, unselfconscious and not very polite. Sieve Draco watched him back, his brows lowered.

"Your collar is dirty," the younger Draco pronounced finally.

Potter flushed and rubbed at the pumpkin stain. "My mum and dad are war heroes," he said, lifting his chin. Watcher Draco wasn't sure whether he was trying to change the subject, or if he thought that heroes in the family were a license to have a stained collar. "That's why we're here. Why are you here?"

Sieve Draco looked blank. "It's a Ministry gala," he said. "We always come to those. Father says that it's expected." His eyes strayed to the pumpkin stain on Potter's collar again. "I suppose if you're not used to them that might be why you're dirty," he said.

Watcher Draco wanted to snort at the replication of his father's insult.

Whether Potter would have found a response equal to Mrs Potter's remained debatable, since at that point Lucius put a hand on Draco's shoulder and said, without looking at him, "Come, Draco. The air is a little thick over this side of the room. We should move on."

The Potters watched them go. Mrs Potter's hand came down on her son's shoulder, an echo of Draco's father's gesture. Her voice was low and a little bleak as she said, "They are not a good family, Harry." She hesitated and added, "It would probably be best if you remembered that when you go to school."

Potter shrugged and twisted to look up at her. "I didn't like him anyway," he said, searching her face. She smiled at him, her face relaxing a little.

Watcher Draco thought he might have been angry if he'd been able to spare the attention. But he couldn't seem to take his eyes away from his father's back, still visible through the shifting mill of people.

He wondered, a little distantly, whether Sieve Draco was getting the same warning that Potter had just got.

He wanted to think that this was still what Lucius was like, rather than filthy and defeated in a cell in Azkaban. And then part of him wanted Lucius to never leave that cell; the part that raged and burned and — had been betrayed.

It was one thing for Lucius to pledge himself to a dark wizard. Or even for him to instil so many of his own opinions into Draco as he grew up that he never even considered not following his father into the Dark Lord's service, when Lucius sent him that letter after Cedric Diggory's death. But the fact was, by joining Voldemort Lucius had sold his whole family to the Dark Lord. That was something Draco hadn't realised until he began to understand that he might fail at his task in sixth year. Both Draco's and Narcissa's lives were forfeit to Voldemort, not because Lucius had failed his lord — that was just an excuse — but because he'd thrown his lot in with a wizard who considered his followers' families his rightful property.

There was no coming back from that kind of betrayal.

The jerk of the If concluding almost passed unnoticed in the painful darkness of Draco's own thoughts. He couldn't look at Crabbe and Goyle when he opened his eyes.

He muttered some excuse and walked quickly away, his eyes on the worn green-and-gold carpet. He knew they wouldn't try to follow him.


	2. Chapter 2

About the last person Draco expected to drop to the grass beside him on Saturday morning was Ginevra Weasley. He gave her a sideways glance, wondering whether she'd actually noticed that he was there.

"I can't believe," she said, not looking at him, "that the person I have most in common with at the moment is Draco Malfoy." She cradled her chin in her hands and stared out over the lawns towards the lake.

_Okay. Knows it's me, then. What the hell?_

"I'm sorry, what are you doing here?" he asked. "Did you need tutoring or something? Because whoever told you that I'm kind to younger students was lying through their teeth."

She shrugged. "Actually, I think the last thing somebody told me about you was that you were the spawn of You Know Who and a Kneazle."

Draco blanched. That was just ... eww.

"... you must have interesting conversations," he managed.

She didn't answer for a moment, still staring moodily out over the grass. When she spoke again it was obvious that she'd changed the subject.

"You're watching him," she said. "I think you're the only person in the school who's been as pathetic about Harry Potter as I have. Well, us and Colin."

His eyes flicked up to the small figure circling and swooping against the blue of the sky. It dove as he watched, heels skimming the top of the lake at the moment it pulled out. An irritable tentacle broke the surface for a moment, then subsided again.

"I'm not watching anybody," he said. She snorted.

"Wait," he said, "did you just compare me to Potter's sycophantic little photographer boy?"

She sighed. "I bought so many of his photographs off him in first year. Well, before ... other stuff happened. Mum kept wanting to know what I was spending my allowance on."

He shot a sideways look at her again, wondering whether she'd go away if he stopped answering.

"I just ..." He was horrified to see a tear leak out of her eye. She blinked it away. "I just didn't expect it to turn out like this, you know? Hermione kept giving me advice but I didn't seriously think he'd ever see me at school. I had these fantasies, about us running into each other years after we'd graduated. He'd notice me just as I was doing something cool and incredibly sexy as a curse breaker — I've always wanted to be one. Ever since I was five and my brother came home with a bandage round his arm from where a vengeful cat mummy had taken a chunk out of it."

The little figure over the lake was doing loops, now, taking its hands off the broom at the top of the loop and then grabbing hold again for the descent.

"I never expected that he'd notice me in fifth year and that he'd still not see me properly. I never thought he'd _put me away_ when the real world intruded again, as if I wasn't even real."

There was a pause. Draco looked at her again. "Seriously, why are you telling me this?"

"I have PMS," she said flatly. "It makes me talkative and not very choosy about my listeners."

He edged away a little, because honestly, who _said_ that?

She finally looked at him. "I'm really glad I don't care what you think, Malfoy. Because — god, you must think I'm the most pathetic person on the earth right about now."

_And you think I'm the love child of Voldemort and a cat_, he thought, but didn't say.

"I'm dating Kevin Entwhistle now, you know." She shrugged, looking away again. "I had to do something to keep face. Do you have any idea how ego-crushing it is to be dumped by the Boy Who Lived?"

"I could guess," he said after a moment. "But I really would prefer it if you went away now. It's nothing personal but being so close to a Weasley is bringing me out in a rash."

She gave him a dangerous smile. "That's funny," she said. "Hermione's Kneazle never liked any of my family either."

*

"I've thought of another If," Draco said as soon as he found Crabbe and Goyle that afternoon. They were sitting on the steps in the courtyard, waiting for him.

Goyle looked up from his comic book, blinking. "Are we doing it tonight?"

"Yes." He scowled. "A Weasley tried to bond with me while you two were gallivanting off to Hogsmeade today. I need something to distract me from thinking about it."

Goyle's eyes widened and he looked at Crabbe to see if he had any clarification.

Crabbe frowned. "A Weasley?"

"Never mind that," Draco said. "Will you two get the sieve and meet me in the library? We can fit it in before dinner, I think."

The courtyard was empty as he recrossed it; the day had got late and dark. A vicious little wind blew, rippling his robes and numbing his ears. He couldn't see anybody out on the lawns anymore either, except that ... he squinted. _Did something rile up the Whomping Willow?_

The light was fading rather badly but he could definitely see something thrashing about near the edge of the Forbidden Forest.

He hesitated for a moment, as it really _was_ cold. Curiosity won out.

It was definitely the willow, he saw as he got closer. He turned his collar up a little higher, hunching his shoulders against the wicked cut of the chill air, and walked nearer.

Now he could hear voices.

"Can't you bind the others, Hermione?"

A sound of frustration. "They won't hold still! Hang on, I'll try a _Petrificus_."

That seemed to rile up the tree even more; the branch movements became even wilder. A leafy limb smashed down near Draco's feet, immediately whipping up again. There was a cry of alarm and then a curse that sounded Weasley-ish.

He moved cautiously around the perimeter, peering into the dusk-lit thrashing shape. They had to be in there somewhere but he couldn't see them.

Ah! There!

There was an agonised sort of quivering near the centre of the commotion and what looked like two branches that didn't move, other than to shiver and groan. It looked as though someone had bound them to each other and to the ground to form a makeshift kind of shelter when the tree became homicidal. Draco could see a flash of red hair and then a glint of glasses as Potter raised his head for a moment and then dropped it beneath an onrushing branch.

Draco couldn't imagine what they'd thought they were doing walking into the Whomping Willow, but they were obviously stuck.

"Oh, I keep _missing_!" Granger cried again, flustered and upset.

"Um. Alright, I'll see if I can ..." Potter trailed off and Draco squinted into the gloom again. He seemed to have his broom with him; as well as Draco could see, he was flat to the ground between the bound branches and inching it bristles-first towards the trunk. It was obvious that it wouldn't reach.

"Argh!" Potter wriggled back, muttering language Draco was a little surprised to find that he knew.

"Wait, how about this?" Draco thought that was Weasley. He didn't hear the spell cast but he guessed it was _Wingardium Leviosa_ when small pebbles began to fly through the air and dash against the trunk of the tree.

He shivered into the collar of his too-thin school robes again. The pebble thing was ... bizarre. They were like children kicking the knees of a giant. _Unless there's something there on the trunk?_ He tried to remember what he'd heard about Whomping Willows. Hadn't Sprout mentioned once that they were often used as burglar alarms? Presumably there had to be some way of deactivating them, then, or you'd never be able to get at whatever they were protecting.

He squinted again. There _was_ an odd sort of knot low down on the trunk, maybe a little too regular to be accidental. It was nearish to where the stones and — well, that looked like a shoe, actually — were hitting. It looked as though they kept just missing it, in fact.

Draco didn't let himself think about it too long. _Didn't I want McGonagall to give me something to do?_ He saw a break in the wildly swinging branches and dived.

His shoulder hit the grass and he rolled, stretching his fingers out. Something bashed to the ground inches from his knees and he twisted reflexively out of the way. His knuckles brushed a rounded bump on the trunk. For a half second the tree continued to move, nightmarish around him. Then it stopped. Creaked.

There was absolute silence.

He rolled to his feet and ran back out from under the overhang of the branches. There was dirt in his hair and now the sweat of adrenaline was drying on his neck and making him even chillier. His shoulder ached; it felt bruised.

Potter was shuffling out from between the two bound-together branches. He was a lot scruffier than the dive had left Draco, with smears of dirt over one cheek and his hair in an even worse state than usual. There was a long rip in his trousers over one knee, crusted with dirt and what looked like beaded blood on a scrape, and he hugged one arm to his chest. Granger and Weasley came after him, a little more slowly. Granger was supporting Weasley with an arm around his waist as he limped over the churned up ground.

They stopped. Granger put up her free hand and pushed the bushy hair out of her face, squinting.

_"Malfoy?_" Potter's voice was blank.

Draco scowled, because he was dirty and cold and, fuck, he'd just thrown himself at a murderous tree.

"Didn't you learn about the Whomping Willow in _second year_, Potter?"

Potter shook his head, his forehead creasing unhappily.

"We ... but _Malfoy_?"

Draco looked at them for a moment longer, dirty and torn-up and suspicous. Then he turned and walked away.

*

Crabbe and Goyle had given up and gone to dinner, of course. Loyalty only took you so far and Draco had had to go back to the dorm after the willow incident to change his clothes.

They tramped off to the library after dinner, though. Draco had been thinking and he'd come up with a moment where he thought, much as his pride objected, that there _could_ have been a modicum of understanding between Potter and himself, if he'd reacted more sanely.

So this time he wrote: _If Draco Malfoy chose not to hex Harry Potter when he discovered him sobbing in a bathroom in their sixth year at Hogwarts._

He touched his wand to the silvery surface and the sieve tipped him into the scene.

 

_If_

The scuffed tiles of the boys' bathroom were instantly familiar. It was clean, of course — the Hogwarts elves would never have let it become unclean — but the snitch pattern at the centre of each wall tile had faded and scuffed almost to invisibility and the tap fittings had the green sheen of corrosion. There were discoloured cracks in the porcelain of the sinks, too.

He concentrated on the room so that he wouldn't have to look at — himself. In front of the cracked mirror, his head bowed and his hands clutching the sink so hard that his fingers had whitened at the joints. His white-blond hair was mussed and teased in tangles, as though he'd clenched his fingers in it.

His shoulders were shaking.

It was horrible.

The dead girl's ghost was hovering in one of the cubicles, looking simultaneously sympathetic and — just a little bit gleeful. Draco had had an idea of how lonely she was when he talked to her in the bathroom last year but he hadn't picked up on the macabre enjoyment she got out of these meetings.

He supposed he'd been a little wrapped up in himself.

"I don't ... I don't know what to do," Sieve Draco was saying, his voice wretchedly uneven. "I can't ... I think he's actually insane, you know, and I know my Aunt Bella is and it's _not going to be okay_." There was an audible sob, then, breaking past the pale lips. Watcher Draco looked away again. He was in time to see Potter carefully push the door open. He stopped, blinking in confusion as he took in Draco at the mirror.

"Don't," the ghost said softly. "Don't ... tell me what's wrong ... I can help you ..."

Sieve Draco shook his head, over and over as though he'd forgotten when he was supposed to stop.

"No one can help me. I can't do it ... I can't ... it won't work ... and unless I do it soon ... he says he'll kill me ..." Gulping sobs made the end of the sentence unintelligible.

Draco was still resolutely watching Potter rather than his own crying form and he saw the realisation of what he was watching break over Potter like a wave. He looked gobsmacked.

Watcher Draco wondered how often he'd see that expression on Potter's face today.

Then the Draco at the mirror looked up. Tear-wet eyes widened in horror.

There were always two distinct approaches to choose between when you were faced with a threat; Draco had thought about that when he chose the If.

The sieve Draco spun around — and bolted.

He shoved Potter aside in a blur of robes and made it out into the hallway. Potter seemed galvanised by the movement. He stumbled, righted himself in a second and tore after him, catching his own shoulder against the doorframe on the way.

Watcher Draco reached the doorway in time to see Potter bring his younger self down in a tangle of limbs and jarred knees. He stopped, wincing in sympathy, and approached more slowly.

Potter was sitting up, dazed. Sieve Draco untangled himself but didn't bother trying to stand up. He drew his knees up against himself in a huddle and glared at Potter.

"What is _wrong_ with you?" His voice was weak and scratchy from the tears.

"Er ..."

Potter didn't usually let his general inarticulateness stop him from talking anyway. Usually he kept talking even when any normal person would have known it was time to _shut up_. Apparently he'd learned to shut up now, though. He didn't seem to have a clue how to explain his chase and flying tackle. He rubbed at his shoulder.

"Is this some sort of Muggle thing?" Draco asked, looking at his knees. "I heard they have games where they jump on each other."

"No. You were ... you were crying."

"I was fucking not."

Potter looked at him carefully, taking in the tear-tracks and squinted eyes.

"Um ..."

"Oh, fuck off, Potter."

Potter reached out a hand, cautiously, and touched his shoulder.

"Malfoy, it's ... uh, okay to cry."

Draco shot him an incredulous look.

"Are you _comforting_ me, Potter? And I'm not bloody well crying."

He wasn't anymore, either. He scrubbed at his cheeks to brush the tear marks away but he didn't seem aware of the mussed condition of his hair, or the reddened, worn state of his eyes. He hunched down a little further into his huddle against the corridor wall.

Draco didn't think he'd ever seen himself look either so bad-tempered or so vulnerable and depressed. It wasn't an attractive look but something about it seemed to be affecting Potter in an unusual way. He wasn't reacting to Draco's insults the way he usually did.

There was a disgusted sniff and he looked up, startled. The dead girl was hovering at the doorway of the bathroom but she didn't seem to want to come out. She looked directly at the real Draco and pouted.

"I thought you were going to fight," she said.

He glanced quickly back at the two boys on the floor but they still couldn't see him.

"Er. We did," he said. "In the real world, I mean. You screamed murder about it."

"Ooh." Her eyes widened. "Was there blood?"

There was that cold lurch in his stomach and — _the chilly tiles underneath him and the pain like nothing and his robes bloodstained and sodden and he was god so scared_.

"Yes," he said shortly.

She nodded her head, sadly.

"I wish I'd been there," she said. She trailed back into the bathroom.

In the corridor, Potter tried the shoulder thing again. Draco shot him another look.

"It's just that ... I've never seen you cr — er, upset, before."

"Oh, sorry," Draco said. "I didn't realise you ever looked up from your Gryffindor fanclub. Do you mean to tell me you actually _notice_ people who aren't trying to get your autograph?"

Potter sucked on his lip, as though he was trying to hold in a frown, or maybe a smile. "You've made yourself pretty noticeable, Malfoy."

Draco didn't answer for a moment. He stared down at his knees again, although he mustn't have been able to see much of them through the fine pale fringe hanging over his eyes. "I'm going to go now," he mumbled.

"No, wait!" Potter grabbed his shoulder this time, even though Draco hadn't made any move to get up. "Malfoy, it's ... I know you've got something to do for Voldemort. And I thought you were ... only what you said to Moaning Myrtle ... and so I just thought maybe you —"

"For god's sake, Potter, can you not actually talk?"

Potter flushed. "You don't have to do it," he said.

It looked as though for a moment Sieve Draco didn't understand what he was talking about. Then he did. He laughed; a loud, startled sound.

"No, listen, Malfoy. Whatever it is — I don't know what it is but I know it's something bad, because Voldemort's never had a plan that I know of that involved flowers and kittens. Unless maybe he was ritually sacrificing the kittens on a field of burned flowers, I suppose. But that's, um. Look, whatever it is — it didn't sound as though you wanted to do it. On the train, I mean, it did, but not ... not just then."

Draco hunched a little further. "No shit."

Potter had been twisting the hem of his robe between his fingers. Now he dropped it in favour of taking hold of Draco's shoulder again. He looked determined and painfully earnest. It wasn't an expression he'd ever turned on Draco before and Watcher Draco sort of wished the Sieve version of himself would look at Potter so that he could see it too.

"You should go to Dumbledore."

Draco shrugged out from under his shoulder and turned to stare at him, for just one moment completely terrified. Watcher Draco could almost see his thoughts printed across his face: _Tell me he doesn't know_.

"He's the only one Voldemort's ever been afraid of, everybody knows that. If you ask him to, he'll protect you. He's been protecting me since I was a year old."

Draco looked at him. "He has?"

Potter rolled his eyes. "Come on, Malfoy, you don't think there weren't plenty of pissed off Death Eaters who wanted me dead after Voldemort fell? He's always protected me."

He hesitated, as if unsure whether to say the next bit. "It was ... I mean, I wasn't _happy_ where he put me. I was miserable, actually, and I grew up thinking I was, you know, basically unlovable. But he had to leave me there. I know that he did, to keep me alive." He said the last bit with absolute conviction.

Watching, Draco found himself overcome by a confused mess of guilt and dislike. He had an idea that he wasn't allowed to be angry at the Headmaster; not when he'd ...

"I need to go," Sieve Draco said again.

"Malfoy —"

"No! Look ..." he raised his head. "I just need to ... I might think about it, alright." He hesitated halfway to rising. "Don't even think about spreading this, Potter. I swear, if you tell ..."

"I won't."

Draco gave him a distrustful look but finished standing. He paused for a moment, as though he was considering saying goodbye, then he shrugged and turned to walk away. He walked quite quickly.

Watcher Draco felt the world darkening around him.

_Surely that isn't IT? I still don't know what happens!_

But there wasn't that tilt around him that meant he was being tipped back into his bedroom. It was more of a very short slide and then ...

*

_Oh. It's a multiple-scene If. Huh._

Sieve Draco was walking down a different corridor with Crabbe and Goyle. It was the one on the way to the Potions classroom, if you were coming from Charms via the South Eastern Staircase.

"... and it looks just like Martin Miggs', it even has a gold and red face, only it's even better because look, it tells the time and date in the centaur calendar ... and in Veelish ... and in the bunyip swamps ... and in Mermish ..."

Goyle angled the new watch further towards Draco.

"Goyle, the merpeople have exactly the same calendar as us; and there's no time difference because they live in the _lake_."

"But it comes up in blue and there are these little bubbles, look. _And_ it works underwater. And at one hundred degrees celcius. And, look, there's a Catch-the-Snitch game you can play with the hands."

He demonstrated, pressing little gold levers on the sides of the heavy wrist watch to make a tiny snitch dash out and bounce between the three hands. He was concentrating on it so fiercely that he missed it when the corridor turned a corner.

Crabbe swung out one hand and halted him with an audible _thwack_ inches from the stone wall. Goyle glanced up briefly, changed direction, and went back to the watch his mother had had delivered by owl post for his birthday the day before. He'd sat up, Draco remembered, almost the entire night before, working out all of the special features. Everyone's sleep had been disturbed with cries of "Hah!" and "Ooh, _ne-e-e-a-at_ ..." and little whirring and beeping noises. After throwing a pillow at him three times Draco had finally zombie walked — still achey from his stint in the hospital wing — out of bed and cast a sloppy silencing charm around him. He'd been woken an hour later by Goyle shaking his shoulders, his face and anxious eyes eerie in the wandlight, mouthing that he needed Draco to help him turn the numbers back from Chinese because he couldn't tell the time anymore.

Crabbe made sure Goyle wasn't going to walk into a wall again and then caught up to Draco, who'd pulled ahead.

"Malfoy, Goyle and I were wondering: how much longer do you need on the, um, project? Will we have to ... with the dresses, again?"

Whatever Draco might have answered to that was lost, because they turned another corner and Potter was leaning against the wall ahead, waiting for them.

He raised his head.

"Malfoy."

"Potter."

Crabbe looked between them, his brow furrowing. Watcher Draco couldn't blame him for being confused. This was about the time when usually one or the other of them would say something hugely insulting, Draco would sneer, Potter would clench his fists and then one or both of them would get badly hexed.

Potter looked awkward.

"Can I ... can I talk to you for a minute, Malfoy?"

Draco broke eye contact with him to look at his friends.

"Crabbe. Goyle. Go on ahead."

Goyle looked up again, blinking, his mouth open to say something — probably something else about the new Super Watch. He closed it when he saw Potter and cast a confused glance at Crabbe. Crabbe shrugged and took his elbow.

Potter watched them out of sight and then took a couple of steps towards him.

"Have you thought about what I said?"

"I'm not sure," Draco said.

Potter blinked and then looked irritated.

"How can you be not sure whether you've thought about it or not?"

"Have you told anyone?"

"About you — no. Of course not."

Draco sneered. "What do you mean, 'of course not'? I'm not your friend, Potter."

Potter drew himself up. "Yeah, well, I don't spread gossip, and I don't kick people when they're down, either."

Draco rolled his eyes. "Right, it must have been somebody else laughing his arse off while I was being bashed up and down against the ground by a Death Eater."

"I didn't —! Oh, yes, alright, I did. That looked really funny, though. And anyway, you tried to hex me when my back was turned."

"You _insulted my mother_," Draco said dangerously.

Potter sneered back. "Because you haven't been calling my mother a Mudblood since the day we _met_."

Draco hesitated. "I'm pretty sure I didn't actually know the word 'Mudblood' until I was twelve," he said. "It's pretty foul. I think my mother would have washed my mouth out if she thought I knew it."

Potter let out his breath and leaned back against the wall. His fringe needed cutting; it was hanging in shaggy locks into his eyes, with one bit sticking up the wrong way. He never cut his fringe in time. He seemed to imagine that he could make people forget about the scar if he covered it up well enough, which was fifty different kinds of stupid as far as Draco was concerned.

"Have you really thought about what I said?"

Draco leaned against the other wall. He scuffed one boot back against the wall, looking determinedly into empty air.

"Would Dumbledore actually protect me? I'm not admitting anything, but — say you're right and I agreed to do something really ... something not nice for the Dark Lord. Wouldn't Dumbledore just throw me in Azkaban if I went and talked to him?" He snuck a look at Potter's face and then looked away again.

"No," Potter said. He said it forcefully, as though he was trying to inject as much certainty as possible into the word. "He wouldn't. He hired Snape, remember, and he was a Death Eater. And a git, so it wasn't as though he did it because he liked him."

Watching, Draco thought it looked as though his younger self was struggling between the usual urge to pipe up in his favourite teacher's defence and the anger that he'd felt towards Snape for most of sixth year. Either way, the real Draco wasn't really all that impressed with the Headmaster's ability to judge character. _Given that Snape is_ still_ a Death Eater and killed Dumbledore himself_. Sieve Draco must have been thinking something along the same lines — Snape had told him about the Unbreakable Vow, after all — because his lip twisted in a bit of a sneer.

"That's only one example, Potter," he said.

"He kept Hagrid too, even though he'd been expelled and the Ministry believed he'd been opening the Chamber of Secrets."

Draco's mouth fell open. "_Hagrid_?" he said. "_That's_ what he was expelled for? Oh, no way."

Watcher Draco entirely agreed. How could anyone imagine that a _half-giant_ had been opening the Chamber of Secrets? He'd have to have had a death wish! That was just imbecilic; he couldn't even imagine who'd be stupid enough to try to frame a mixed-blood student.

"Well, obviously he wasn't," Potter said, frowning. "But look, Malfoy — Dumbledore would protect you. I know he would."

Draco was silent for an eternally stretching minute. He looked at his hands. Potter shifted.

"... and my family?" Draco asked eventually.

Potter's face hardened some. "Your dad's in Azkaban. I don't think Voldemort's going to get him there."

Draco sneered. "Like you care," he said. "You put him there, you wanker."

Potter glared. "Your dad stood and watched while Voldemort tortured me, Malfoy. Excuse me if I'm not all eaten up with worry about him."

Watcher Draco admitted that Potter did have a point. And Lucius probably _was_ safe in Azkaban. A whole lot safer than Draco had been that year, anyway.

Sieve Draco paused. Then he seemed to concede much the same thing.

"What about my mother?" he asked.

"Um. Probably."

"_Probably_?"

Potter scowled. "Your mother's not very nice either, Malfoy. My godfather died because of her. She can probably look out for herself."

Draco didn't react to the second part of the sentence. His face twisted, angry and white.

"You don't talk about my mother, Potter." He shook his head, getting a hold of himself. "Just tell me whether she'll be protected. Have you already talked to Dumbledore about this? Did he mention her?"

Potter shook his head. "No, I haven't. Look — she probably will be. I'm almost sure she would be. Dumbledore's ... he's not like anyone else. If she ... as long as she _wanted_ to be protected — and not work for Voldemort anymore — then he would let her."

Draco didn't say anything.

Potter stared at him, as though he could will the right response out of him.

"Just ... come with me to his office. Or tell me what's going on, you must ... you haven't even told Crabbe and Goyle, you must want to tell someone. I know you want to stop."

"Tomorrow," Draco said abruptly. "I'll decide tomorrow. Meet me at the statue of the hump-backed witch after dinner."

"Okay." Potter sounded happy, as though he hadn't expected that much. "We're going to be really late for Potions," he added.

Draco scowled. "As if Slughorn would take points off you anyway. He practically drools over you. I think he wants to have little Potter babies."

Potter looked nauseous. "Ew, Malfoy. And anyway, it's nothing to how Snape fawns over you. I'll bet you never lost a point in Potions class before Slughorn."

Draco shrugged. "I was just good," he said. Potter rolled his eyes.

The scene faded as they began moving off down the corridor. They were walking just a little bit too far apart to be said to be walking together.

There was darkness and a short slide.

*

Light came back accompanied by a cacophony of clattering and talking and laughter. The domed roof above showed a pale pink and blue sky, partly clouded.

Breakfast in the Great Hall.

Draco had never watched breakfast from the outside before. It was a bit of a pantomime. From across the hall, Potter was watching Sieve Draco in a way that was probably supposed to be subtle. He wasn't very good at subtle; he was being completely obvious. Nobody at his table paid any attention to his staring, though, and Draco supposed they were all used to Potter stalking him in sixth year. Not even Granger and Weasley seemed to be interested in where his eyes were fixed. That was a bit of a surprise, actually. Had he not told even them about the conversations he'd had with Draco?

That was an oddly warm and squiggly feeling that he did his best to banish.

At the Slytherin table, sixth year Draco was eating his breakfast with an unusual amount of attention. He avoided even looking in Potter's direction.

Goyle still had his eyes glued to his new watch. His other hand ferried food to his mouth but for once he didn't even look at it. By the expression of concentration on his face, Draco assumed that he was playing the Catch-the-Snitch game. Draco wasn't even sure that there was a way to win that but even now Goyle never seemed to tire of playing it.

Crabbe was pouring most of his energies into eating. Every now and then he snatched a look at Padma Patil at the Ravenclaw table. He seemed to be checking that she was still there. He had the most angst-free crush Draco had ever come across. He had no intention of ever talking to her and no jealousy of anybody she did talk to. He simply thought that she was the best thing ever.

Nott and Zabini were arguing about something. There was a piece of parchment shoved into the space between the plates in front of them, on which a rough map or diagram had been sketched. Nott kept breaking off to add something to the parchment. Pansy was down the far end of the table, surrounded by her pack. There seemed to be a fair amount of hilarity involved in the group; Draco could see her pink hairgrip securing the spray of feathery dark hair bobbing as she let out a scream of laughter.

The owl post swept in. Sieve Draco started when Echo, his mother's snowy owl, dropped an envelope into his breakfast, splashing him with milk droplets. He fished it out, passing a piece of bacon up to Echo as she circled on her way out of the hall, and slit the flap open with his breakfast knife. Watcher Draco moved closer so that he could read over his shoulder.

_My dear Draco,_

I trust that you are well. I visited your father yesterday. He is still arguing for an appeal. In the meantime, in the absence of the Dementors, he is moderately comfortable.

Bella tells me that she was in contact with you one week ago, at which point you were still unable to tell her when you expected to complete your task. I beg of you, my dear son: if you are lost in any way, turn to Professor Snape for advice. I don't understand why your letters have been so scathing of him. He was your favourite teacher in past years.

Your loyalty to Professor Snape has, I believe, prevented Headmaster Dumbledore taking too keen an interest in you over the years. For that I am glad. The Headmaster is a very clever man, despite his apparent lunacies. He has a surer hand in manipulation than almost any man I have met. It was a great mistake on somebody's part to allow him to gain such a stranglehold over the Potter boy's heart. But the evidence that he could leave a boy with Muggles for ten years and still gain his loyalty instantly at age eleven is a testament to his powers. I believe he has Potter so tightly bound to him now that nothing could turn him away. I am glad, despite your danger, that he never had that chance with you.

Act quickly, my son. Turn to Professor Snape; every day you delay only adds to your danger. I know that you will not think I speak metaphorically when I tell you that the wolves circle the manor every day now.

Your loving mother,

Narcissa

Watcher Draco read quickly, worried that his other self would finish before him and put the letter away. Sieve Draco showed no sign of finishing, however. He seemed to be reading it over, unable to put it down.

He hadn't got this letter last time. Instead there had been one while he was in the Hospital Wing; full of frantic worry, reassurance about the pale network of scars on his chest and dark references to Harry Potter's psychotic tendencies.

"Draco!" Pansy startled both of them when she dropped an arm around Sieve Draco's neck. Neither had heard her approach. "What's that? Does your mother send you piles of love?" She dropped into the space next to him, casting a self-conscious glance at Nott on her other side and then looking determinedly away. She reached over Draco and pinched one of his pieces of toast, then stared at his letter as she munched, an intense expression on her shadowy little face."I swear, I envy you your mother," she said. "Mine sends me reference books and Study-Ease quills. I think," she added, "that she wanted a Ravenclaw daughter."

Draco shoved the letter face down on the table.

"Yes. It's from my mother."

She stretched her hand towards his plate again. "Can I have ...?"

"You can have all of it, Parkinson. The letter — I have to go."

"Er. Your mother said that?"

Draco got to his feet without replying.

Crabbe and Goyle made to get up as he rose but he shot them scowls so fierce they dropped again immediately. Pansy watched him with a startled, speculative expression on her face as he walked quickly towards the doors, leaving his bag and books on the seat.

Seventh year Draco caught him up at the statue of the hump-backed witch. He was slumped against the carved grey folds of her skirt, the letter crumpled between his hands. He smoothed it out again as the real Draco watched, reading it over once more. From the way he was holding it it seemed to be the last half of the letter that he was fixated on.

Footsteps rang on the stone corridor. Potter rounded the corner at a cautious pace, although his breath was coming fast as though he'd run most of the way here. Draco stood up.

"I'm not doing it," he said. "I'm not going to Dumbledore."

"Malfoy ..."

"No! You can't even guarantee that my mother will be safe. Do you know what she's ... do you know the kind of danger she's in? As if I would put her in more danger. You can just ... run to Dumbledore, whatever, I don't care. I won't tell him a thing, or you either."

Potter's face darkened. "I'm not just going to let you do whatever it is Voldemort wants you to, Malfoy. I'm going to find a way to stop you, you know."

Draco gave him an incredulous look. "You really think you can stop me, Potter? You think you can stop him? You're crazy if you think you can stop the Dark Lord. I must have been crazy to even think about listening to you. You can just go back to Dumbledore and tell him to stop using you to try to get to me. I'm not going to fall for it."

"I told you Dumbledore didn't ..."

"Oh, please, Potter. You expect me to believe you just offered to help me out of the goodness of your heart? Because we're such good _friends_? You'd do anything for him. You named a fucking vigilante group after him. You've been his little dog since first year."

Potter flushed with anger. "It's better than being _Voldemort's_ dog, Malfoy."

"Well, except that the Dark Lord's actually going to _win_. Because he's not a dotty old man who relies on a schoolboy to fight his battles for him."

"He won't."

Draco raised his eyebrows.

Potter bit his lip. "I'm going to find out what you're doing."

Draco sneered.

Potter turned and stormed back around the corner. His stomping footsteps echoed down the corridor.

Sieve Draco slowly lowered himself back down against the base of the statue, his head in his hands.

The world tilted and darkened and Draco was in the library again.

He dropped into a seat at the desk the sieve rested on and buried his face in his hands; just like the Draco in the If.


	3. Chapter 3

_If you ask him to, he'll protect you. He's been protecting me since I was a year old._

Draco made a face at his mirror. He didn't know why he was still thinking about that.

_Dumbledore's ... not like anyone else._

He put his toothbrush down and turned away.

Potter had sounded so sincere. How could he believe in Dumbledore like that? The Headmaster had been ... with his favouritism and his idiotic speeches and the way he'd dumped the infant saviour of the world onto Muggles who made him miserable. It didn't make sense.

Except ... _He's the only one Voldemort's ever been afraid of, everybody knows that._ Except Potter had believed in him.

He wiped his mouth on a towel and wandered back out into the seventh year dorm. Goyle was buried in another comic book on his bed and Crabbe was frowning at his Charms textbook. Nott and Zabini were playing a rather loud game of cards; Draco wasn't sure what the rules were but Zabini was apparently losing quite badly and had already pledged to be Nott's slave for a week, plus whatever he got for his birthday.

Draco closed himself inside his bed curtains and drew the covers up over his chin.

Given how things had turned out, he rather wished that he'd chosen to throw himself on Dumbledore's mercy or something at the beginning of last year, rather than living through that hellish year and the nightmare at the top of the Astronomy Tower. But he hadn't felt even a shadow of guilt when he was planning last year. He'd never liked Dumbledore and when the choice, as the Dark Lord presented it, had been the Headmaster's life or that of Draco and his mother — honestly, he hadn't even had to think about it.

When he was presented with a man whom he'd never actually _hated_, defenceless and reasoning with him for his life, then yes, okay, he'd discovered that maybe he didn't quite have the will to murder somebody, no matter how strong the incentive. But he'd been relieved to see Snape do it instead; relief so strong he nearly passed out. He'd never been guilty about letting in the Death Eaters — as soon as he'd been sure Greyback hadn't killed or turned anyone — and setting in motion the events that led to Dumbledore's death.

Narcissa or Dumbledore. It wasn't a choice.

Except. Except for some reason Potter had ... _loved_ Dumbledore. Draco was almost sure that was what his tone had meant.

He rolled over, pounding irritably at his pillow.

Somehow it had never occurred to him that Dumbledore had had people who loved him.

It was stupid and it didn't make any difference now; but it hadn't.

*

Weasley must have spent at least part of the day in the hospital wing, after what happened at the Whomping Willow, since there was no sign of him in Potions the next morning.

Potter worked with Granger; her bushy hair almost obscured his face as she explained something. Their cauldren bubbled in a well-behaved fashion at her elbow.

"Malfoy, did you do something with the Skrewt teeth?"

Draco thought for a second and located the teeth under the green and pink coils of chain-of-hearts on their desk top. He pushed them across to Nott, who tipped them into the mortar and began grinding them into powder. Draco, stirring the cauldren in the careful, even circles Nott was incapable of, looked back at Potter and Granger.

Granger was adding the sheared-off leaves of their chain-of-hearts, one precise heart at a time, while Potter separated sticky strands of mermaid hair and laid them across their countertop. His fingers were deft and careful and he worked with unusual concentration. Maybe he was trying to make up some lost ground on his plummeting Potions reputation.

He frowned, absently brushing his hair back from his face, and left a smear of clear wetness on his cheekbone.

Draco wondered whether Granger would point it out, or if he'd walk around with it on his cheek all day, oblivious.

Granger said something to him. He laid down the last of the mermaid hair and took up a quill, scratching notes onto the parchment at his elbow. He chewed on the little finger of his left hand as he wrote. Then he absently sucked on the tip, pressing his knuckles against his mouth.

Maybe he felt Draco's stare intensify. He looked up, scrubbing self-consciously at his cheek, and flushed a little. Then he scowled, his eyes narrowing in easy suspicion.

Draco looked away. He concentrated on the embarrassment of being caught staring. It was easier to think about than the prickly, sick disappointment in his stomach.

"Is that fine enough?"

He glanced at Nott's Skrewt teeth-powder and made a face.

"Too fine. We're going to have to add extra sea salt."

Nott poked at the contents of the stone bowl. "Are you sure? We could just add more teeth."

Draco rolled his eyes. "If we want to spend the whole night having nightmares rather than lucid dreams when Slughorn makes us test it." He glanced up the top of the room where the professor was leaning back at his desk reading a letter, a satisfied-cat expression on his lips. Then he looked at Nott again, smirking a bit.

"Although if that's the only way you can get your thrills ..."

Nott shook his head at him, not looking up from the bowl where he was blending salt with the Skrewt teeth. "Wanker."

Draco didn't look at Potter again for the remainder of the lesson.

*

He spent his free time between Transfigurations and dinner the next day back in the library, scribbling down ideas for a new If. It took him a while to realise that his corner of the library wasn't actually deserted: there were people on the other side of the tall shelf by his shoulder. Every now and then somebody would sigh loudly and turn a page and somebody else would shush them. At one point someone apparently stood up and paced. There was a bitten off protest and a scramble and Draco speculated that they'd just tripped over the other person's (unless there were more than two people) legs.

He was considering moving to another desk, where he could have peace and quiet while he pretended to study, when Potter broke the silence.

"I just want to know what he _meant_ by it."

There was a muffled thump as somebody closed a book, then a sigh.

"Maybe he didn't mean anything by it, Harry." That was Granger.

"He meant _something_ by it. Why would he help us like that? Do you think it was a trap? Did he set up the willow to catch us in the first place?"

A louder sigh now. "The willow caught us because we took too long getting to the tunnel. If Ron hadn't dropped his broom we would have been in time."

"It snagged on the ground!" Weasley this time; the full complement then.

Draco wondered where this tunnel they seemed to think was under the Whomping Willow led to. Out of school grounds, he supposed.

"Sorry, Ron. I just meant there wasn't any conspiracy, honestly. Although I think when we try again tomorrow night we should probably go via the Hump-Backed Witch statue. The willow's too erratic."

"I don't believe he just meant to help us." That was Potter again, a stubborn note in his voice. "He had some other motive, you know he did."

There was a thump, like somebody dropping a book, or maybe thumping their head back against a bookshelf.

"Here's an idea," Weasley said. "We could _stop talking about Malfoy_. He helped us, he didn't help us, whatever. I thought you were angry at Snape rather than him, anyway."

"That was before he waltzed back into the school as though he'd bought it! You can't kill the Headmaster and then just walk right back in! I want to know what McGonagall was _thinking_."

"He didn't kill Professor Dumbledore," Granger said, a cautious note in her voice. "You were watching and you told us he couldn't. You said he lowered his wand."

There was a pause. Draco's eyebrows were climbing to his hair. Potter had been _watching_? Did he have a wizard's spyglass as well as an invisibility cloak?

"I just want to know what he was doing," Potter said finally. Weasley groaned.

Draco listened for a little longer but they seemed to have run out of conversation. They left five minutes before dinner. Draco followed a couple of minutes later.

*

He dragged Crabbe and Goyle back to the library after dinner. This time he put in: _If Harry Potter chose to like Draco Malfoy when he met him in Diagon Alley before their first year at Hogwarts._ He dropped it into the sieve. There was a brief moment in which it sank and then, like the Voldemort-bunny slipper If, it came out again in three tattered pieces, accompanied by a crackle of sparks.

*

"So Blaise said you were in a foul mood last night." Pansy dropped into the space next to him at breakfast. "Does that mean you did another scene in your sieve where it turned out Potter hated you like Brussels sprouts on toast?"

Draco swished the pumpkin juice in his glass, frowning in concentration.

"No," he said. "It didn't work at all. I think I worded it wrong. You don't _choose_ to like someone, do you? You only really choose about things you're going to do."

"I guess? You do know I don't know what you're talking about here."

He smiled at her, swift and flashing. "I don't think I played that first meeting with Potter very well, actually. Sometimes I tend to brag; I don't know if you've noticed that."

"... no?" she said faintly.

He waved a hand. "Well, whatever. But the point is, I met Potter and I wanted to impress him, right? Because I was eleven and a bit pathetic. _But_ I had to have made a choice about how I was going to do it. It just happens that I chose to brag. I didn't always do that. I'll bet I could have done it another way."

She looked doubtful. "I guess, Draco."

He turned to grab another sausage from the piled platter and became aware that Goyle had gone stiff and tense beside him. He was reading a letter — the post had come about ten minutes ago but Draco hadn't received anything so he'd hardly noticed it. Goyle's shoulders hunched a little further as Draco watched.

Crabbe met Draco's eyes. "It's from Phoebe," he said quietly.

Draco hesitated a moment. Then he tapped Goyle on the shoulder. The other boy jumped. He looked hunted.

"Let me read," Draco ordered. Goyle passed it over without a word.

It was fairly short.

_Dear Gregory,_

The Dark Lord grows in strength and potency. His path is the path of glory. I know that you agree with me, if you could break free of the influence of the Malfoy outcast.

It is for us to act in our father's stead now that his fidelity to our Lord has led to his persecution. I will not betray him — I could not. I need your promise that you could not either.

Mother continues to pretend the war does not exist. I despise her for it. I do not want to despise you too, my little brother.

I will talk to you more at Christmas.

My love,

Phoebe Goyle

Draco's lip curled. Goyle's sister hadn't even joined the Death Eaters before her father's arrest and now 'his path is the path of glory'? Her letters to Goyle had been increasingly fanatical this year. She seemed to believe that she could make up for her father rotting in prison if she believed in Voldemort enough. Draco sincerely doubted that Goyle Senior cared much about the war at this stage, or about anything other than dreams of hot baths and soft beds.

"Ignore her," he said, passing it back.

Goyle put it in his pocket.

"Are you sure about fighting against the Dark Lord?" he asked in a low voice.

Draco gave him a level look.

"He let all of our fathers rot in prison. He preaches about purity and tradition and then recruits the deranged and sadistic and gives them free rein. He sent a paedophile werewolf into our _school_ to help kill the Headmaster. He _threatened my mother_." Draco went back to his breakfast. "I'm sure."

*

Draco wrote carefully, taking pain with his penmanship: _If Draco Malfoy chose to impress Harry Potter by making him laugh rather than by bragging to him, when they met in Diagon Alley before their first year at Hogwarts._ He pulled back and looked at it. It read kind of awkwardly but he thought it might work.

Goyle had put his letter away. He seemed to be trying to forget it. He had his small hoard of Honeydukes chocolates spread out on the desk in front of them — his cloak nearby to throw over them if Madam Pince came by — and he was ordering them by size and colour.

Crabbe settled by a bookshelf to keep watch, solid and reliable.

Draco dropped the parchment into the sieve and watched it turn blue with satisfaction. He reached his wand through the intersecting rings.

 

_If_

Madam Malkin's Robes For All Occasions formed around him. It looked as it always did, the lighting subdued and tasteful. Sieve Draco stood on a stool at the back of the shop, looking absurdly small again. He was half swamped in swathes of black material; far more than could be needed to make his school robes. His pointed little face looked a bit anxious and his hair was mussed; probably by the robe going over his head. He and the witch pinning his robes both turned their heads as the shop bell chimed.

Harry Potter slipped through the door as soon as it was open far enough. He stopped on the threshold, letting the door close behind him. Madam Malkin had been totting something up at the counter but she bustled forwards now with a smile.

"Er," Potter said.

"Hogwarts, dear? Got the lot here," — she smiled as though that was a ministry secret she was telling him in confidence — "another young man being fitted up just now, in fact."

Potter's eyes slid to Draco in the back and he bit his lip. Madam Malkin steered him over and found another stool for him to stand on. He looked a bit overwhelmed as an identically enormous black robe was placed over his head.

Sieve Draco was still watching him unabashedly. He looked curious and a bit excited — Watcher Draco could remember how excited he'd been all the time during the lead-up to his first year at Hogwarts. He'd barely slept at any point between receiving his letter and boarding the Express.

"Hullo," he said as soon as Potter's head was clear of the robe. "Hogwarts too?"

"Yes."

"Don't you feel like a Dementor or something in these robes?" Sieve Draco asked. He waved his arms, wriggling his fingers inside the acres of black sleeve, and made a _Whooo_ sound. ("Keep still, love," the witch pinning his hem told him.)

Potter obviously didn't understand what he was talking about but he laughed anyway.

Draco looked encouraged. He moved his arms again, spookily, ignoring the _tsk_ from the witch pinning his hem. "Come closer, your soul will be tasty," he said in a rasping voice. "Come closer and let me kiss you."

Potter let out a startled giggle. "Did you say _kiss_?"

"Didn't you know that Dementors kiss you?" Sieve Draco asked, dropping into his normal voice. "It's how they suck out your so-o-oul." He drew out the last word, obviously deriving a lot of enjoyment from of the idea.

Potter looked unnerved but he was also leaning forward a bit. "They do?"

Draco nodded. "They lay a shrivelled grey hand on your shoulder and then they suck your soul out of you and _crunch_ on it. Then they sit around picking bits of soul out of their teeth."

Potter had leaned a little too far forward. Madam Malkin had to put out a hand to steady him as he wobbled on the stool.

"Do they do — that — a lot?" he asked. He sounded wary.

Draco paused. "Only to convicted criminals," he admitted. "And my father says that only fools and villains get convicted by the Wizengamot."

Potter frowned. "What do you need to do to have one of those — to have that done to you?"

Draco shrugged. "Kill someone, I suppose. I say, look at that man!"

Watcher Draco and Potter both turned to see Hagrid blocking out all the sun at the window, holding up two enormous icecream cones and grinning at Potter.

"That's Hagrid," Potter said, a happy, proud note entering his voice. "He works at Hogwarts. He gave my cousin Dudley a tail."

Draco blinked. "I've heard of him," he said. "I thought he couldn't really do magic. Do you think ... will he give the students tails, would you think?"

"Only the nasty ones," Potter said, with the supreme unconcern of somebody who has absolutely no doubt that the nasty ones mean definitely not him.

Draco looked a bit relieved. "Oh, well, then," he said. "I suppose your cousin deserved it."

Potter bounced a bit on his stool, apparently needing more emphasis than his voice could give alone. "He _did_," he said fiercely. "He's horrible. The only person in the world who's more horrible is my uncle Vernon."

Draco blinked a little.

"... I have an aunt who's mad," he said eventually. Watcher Draco couldn't tell if he was offering sympathy or trying to compete.

Madam Malkin began rose to her feet with a general bustling sound. "That's you done, my dear," she said cheerily. She was apparently unfazed by horrible uncles and mad aunts. Watcher Draco wondered idly what the second witch was doing with his robes, when he'd been there longer than Potter and she _still_ hadn't finished. Sieve Draco was too distracted to notice, though.

"What's your name?" he asked as Potter hopped down from the footstool.

"Er, Harry," Potter said. "Harry Potter."

Draco stared at him for a moment, his mouth falling open and his eyes dragging up and down the other boy as though he must look different now. Then he smiled, brilliant and blinding.

"I'm Draco Malfoy," he said. "I'll see you at Hogwarts, I expect."

Potter was blinking away the effects of the smile. He smiled back, uncertainly. "I expect so."

Madam Malkin let out her breath in a whoosh once he was out the door. "Fancy that. I measured Harry Potter for his first school robes! Who would have thought?"

Watcher Draco took his eyes away from the door that had closed behind Potter and then the room lurched in darkness. There was a short slide.

*

This was a smallish stone chamber in ... probably Hogwarts, judging by the small horde of anxious first years milling about it. Draco had to move quickly aside to prevent three of them walking through him. He knew from Pensieve experiences that that was unnerving.

He spotted his own fair head amongst the others. Harry Potter stood near him and Crabbe and Goyle hulked comfortingly behind. Potter was trying to straighten his hair.

"Do you know how they sort us into houses?" he asked, glancing between Draco, Crabbe and Goyle. This was just before the Sorting, then; Draco remembered McGonagall giving them a brief speech about the four houses before disappearing through a door and leaving them to stew.

"It's a ... test of some kind, I think," Draco said. "To see what kind of person you are. I'll be in Slytherin, of course, all of my family have been." He said this confidently but there were lines of strain around his mouth. Watcher Draco could remember the terrible fear of disappointing Lucius over this — this test that he couldn't control.

Potter fiddled with the hem of his black sleeve — no longer trailing over his fingers in folds. "What if ... er, there's no house for you? If you don't belong anywhere?"

Draco scoffed. "Everybody gets Sorted. If they don't know what to do with you they just throw you in Hufflepuff, everybody knows that."

Potter frowned and Watcher Draco wondered if he was worrying that he'd be a Hufflepuff or, in contrary Potter-fashion, determining to like Hufflepuffs.

A couple of people screamed and all four boys spun around. Potter remained tense but the other three relaxed as they saw the company of ghosts who had just sailed through one of the walls. They were arguing: the Fat Friar and Nearly Headless Nick seemed to be discussing the Bloody Baron again. _As though what they think of him would make any difference to him,_ Draco thought. _Slytherin definitely has the best house ghost._

"I say, what are you all doing here?" Nearly Headless Nick interrupted himself to ask, noticing the first years.

"New students!" the Friar cried. He was as delighted as though he'd had them ordered specially. "About to be Sorted, I suppose?"

Sieve Draco rolled his eyes.

"Hope to see you in Hufflepuff!" He flashed a cheery grin. "My old house, you know."

"Obviously," Sieve Draco murmured and Watcher Draco could almost see him redoubling his determination to be Sorted into Slytherin.

Potter blinked, turning to look at him. "Those were ghosts," he whispered.

Draco grinned and would have replied but McGonagall was back and ordering them into a line. The four boys shuffled into a roughly line-shaped formation and joined the rest.

Watcher Draco followed them out into the Great Hall.

He walked down to the Slytherin table where he could see everything and found a piece of wall to stand against. He was a bit bored through the rendition of the Sorting Hat's song — you would think that with an entire year to come up with it, the hat might have worked out a better line than 'For I'm a Thinking Cap.'

The Sorting started and he watched it progress. It was odd seeing people he knew so nervous about their Sorting. He wanted to pat Crabbe on the back when he came up and promise that there'd never been any doubt about his going to Slytherin.

There was Sieve Draco on the stool, now. The hat completely covered his eyes. He looked tense and ridiculous, but it was over in barely a second with a shouted SLYTHERIN! He saw himself get up, cocky with relief, and saunter off to his new table to sit by Crabbe and Goyle.

When Potter stepped up, the entire hall broke out in whispers. Draco could remember how deeply irritated he had been by that. This time, though, the eleven-year-old Draco leaned forward eagerly.

It seemed to take forever; Draco wondered whether Potter was communing with the hat or something. They said it could be talkative sometimes, although it hadn't seemed to need to talk to him.

"SLYTHERIN!"

Draco stepped backwards through the wall.

By the time he'd gathered himself and pushed back into the hall — nerving himself up to walk through solid rock — Potter was most of the way to the Slytherin table. The cheering hadn't died away yet. Draco watched in disbelief as his younger self scooted aside to make room for Potter, giving him a smug grin.

"Why did it take so long?" he demanded as soon as the other boy was seated.

"It was ... making up its mind," Potter said. "I think. It sounded as though it wanted to put me in all the houses at once. But it said I could be — that Slytherin could be good and I knew you were here, so ... I said that would be okay." He flushed. "Um."

Sieve Draco looked as though he'd won some sort of prize. But he only said, "Slytherin's the best house. You'll see."

Crabbe and Goyle both nodded emphatically; Crabbe looked as though he was a bit dizzy with the relief of getting into the right house himself. Goyle was grinning ear to ear and looked as though he could barely breathe with the excitement of having Harry Potter in his house; or that could have been because the feast had just materialised.

Watcher Draco was still gaping when the slide took him away.

*

The floor re-formed and found him alone in a familiar room. His own dormitory, as it looked at the beginning of every year, with beds neatly made and one trunk at the foot of each bed. There was an extra bed, this time.

He turned around at a thump of feet and voices in time to see the door swung open. It was himself pushing it but all six boys seemed to enter as a mass, a kind of many-limbed eleven-year-old-boy, chattering excitedly.

"... and then he _squealed_ and when he turned around he had a _tail_," Potter was saying as he came in, his face alight.

"That was really how you got your Hogwarts letter?" Zabini demanded. He threw his robes over the bed with his trunk and flopped onto it. "The groundskeeper turned up at an island in the middle of the _ocean_ and gave your cousin a tail?"

"Wicked ..." Nott said.

Potter nodded. "My uncle didn't want me to get it. I don't know why, since he was pretty keen to get rid of me."

Sieve Draco finished examining his bed and perched on the end of it. "How could he object to you having magic?" He wrinkled his forehead. "That doesn't make any sense, Potter."

Potter shrugged. He seemed distracted; it looked as though he'd just noticed the room properly. He was staring wide-eyed at the four-poster beds and the enchanted landscape paintings. "My aunt and uncle just didn't like magic," he said. "They thought it was freakish."

"But your aunt and uncle are Muggles," Draco said, slowly.

Potter nodded. "Yeah, that was why they didn't like it, I guess."

"That's so stupid," Draco said. "Why wouldn't they want to be better than they are? I thought everybody wanted magic."

"Didn't the owls try to deliver your letter, though?" Nott asked. He was sitting on his own bed, leaning back against the bunched up curtains at the headboard.

Potter grinned. "They _tried_," he said. "There were about two hundred owls sitting on our house trying to get in and once this whole pile of letters came down the chimney, but my aunt and uncle always kept me from getting them. They wouldn't even let Dudley see one. He was so annoyed." He grinned again. "It was like it was raining letters, there were _thousands_ of them."

"You got thousands of letters?" Goyle asked, wide-eyed.

Watcher Draco remembered Dobby coming into the library where he was sitting by his father, pretending to study the first year Charms textbook. The house elf had had the letter on a silver salver and Draco had stared hard at it, because he'd stared at _any_ letter around that time in case it was the Hogwarts one. Lucius had taken it and dismissed Dobby as though it wasn't anything important and then he'd checked the envelope for hexes and Draco had nearly died of impatience before he was allowed to open it.

It didn't seem as impressive, somehow, as having thousands of letters rain down your chimney. More dignified, certainly, but less impressive.

"You don't need to _envy_ him, Goyle," Sieve Draco said scathingly. "They all said the same thing, you know."

Potter grinned and flopped back onto his elbows. "Well, _maybe_ they did," he said. "I don't know, do I? I didn't get to read them. Half of them could have been copied down nursery rhymes or something."

Draco rolled his eyes. "Sure." He mimed writing at a desk and pulled a dotty, benevolent face. Watcher Draco supposed it was meant to be Dumbledore. "'Dear Mr Potter,'" he said, pretending to write, "'We are pleased to inform you that _Minnie Malters was a Squib, When Matthew Muggle broke her rib. Minnie's brother wasn't pleased, so Matthew left without his knees._'"

The other boys laughed, although Zabini threw a pillow at him and demanded to know whether he remembered all his nursery rhymes like a good boy. Draco hexed the pillow into a pillow with teeth (Watcher Draco suspected he'd attempted a full animal transfiguration but only managed the fangs) and threw it back. Zabini dodged, yelping.

Potter laughed harder. "Is that ... are all wizarding nursery rhymes like that?" he asked. "With people losing their knees?"

Draco shook his head, sitting down again. "Do you really not know anything about the wizarding world?" he asked. "Not _anything_? Not even nursery rhymes?"

Potter shook his head. He reached up in a nervous motion and tried to flatten his hair (Draco didn't think he ever even tried that any more. It was clearly a lost battle at eleven.) "I don't," he said. "Not anything. I didn't know wizards _existed_. I ... is everybody else going to know everything? That girl on the train, she said she was brought up as a Muggle, but she'd already read all the textbooks and she knew loads more than me. They're ..." He chewed on his lip, his expression fierce and uncertain at the same time. "They're going to boot me out after the first class, when I really _won't_ know anything and they decide I'm an idiot."

Zabini frowned. He'd pushed the snapping pillow onto the floor, as far away from his bed as he could get it. "I think there are quite a few Muggle-born students every year," he said. "A couple of the Slytherin girls in our year are, aren't they? I think that girl Greengrass said she was."

Draco made a face. "They shouldn't let _any_ in. That's what my father says. They're ..." he noticed Potter's face and realised he wasn't helping. "Er. I mean. There probably are quite a few. Father says it's a disgrace, so there must be a couple, at least. And anyway, we'll teach you." He grinned, triumphant. "You won't be ignorant, because we'll tell you everything you need to know. You'll know loads more than that obnoxious Muggle-born girl."

"Really?"

"What do you want to know?" Nott asked. He leaned forward, looking interested. He still had his feet on the floor; he glanced down and moved them out of the way of Zabini's pillow, which was growling a little and dragging itself along with its teeth.

Potter hesitated. He pulled himself further up against his headboard and drew his knees up. "Well, Hagrid told me a bit about ... Voldemort," he said eventually.

Zabini banged his head on his elbow sitting up so fast and Nott leaned away again. Crabbe and Goyle both looked a little scared.

"You want to know about You-Know-Who," Nott said blankly.

Potter looked from one to another of them. He finally settled on Draco, probably because he appeared the least alarmed. "Hagrid already told me a bit," he said. "But it's just ... well, on the train, everybody was asking me to show them my scar. Everybody knows about how he tried to kill me and everybody says it's some kind of miracle that he couldn't. And he killed my parents and everyone knows all about it. Except me. I just ... I want to know."

Sieve Draco chewed on the end of his finger, thinking. "Well, he disappeared when I was one," he said. "And my father says he's really gone. Sometimes the _Daily Prophet_ says he's coming back but Father always says it's rubbish and he was too powerful a wizard to hide away, so he would only disappear if he was dead."

"Well, that's ... good, right?" Potter said. "Hagrid talked about him as though he was Darth Vader or Sauron or something." He looked at the blank faces. "Er. I mean, as if he was really evil, some kind of pure evil lord."

Sieve Draco made a face. "He wasn't _evil_," he said. "That's not what my father says. He says the Dark Lord had some good ideas but he just took them a bit too far, sometimes."

Potter looked at him as though he'd sprouted an extra head.

"He killed my parents," he said.

Sieve Draco hesitated. "Well, yes, but ... Father says he was working from sound principles." He sat up a bit, his voice gaining confidence — and a noticible obnoxious streak — as he got into his stride. "Father says that the Ministry has become dangerously liberal and that it's only a matter of time before we have a Muggle-born Minister who will rip Wizarding Britain apart because he doesn't understand it. He says that the Dark Lord said what everybody else was afraid to say: that Muggles are wizards' natural enemies and the only way to keep them harmless is to suppress them and that letting Muggle-born people into the wizarding world is contaminating it and everything that purebloods hold dear is being threatened."

Nott burst in.

"_My_ father says that the only people who supported You-Know-Who were young fools who should have known better and nearly all of them regretted it."

Draco gave him a careless look. "Well, yes, the ones who went to Azkaban did, I expect."

Potter's face had been twisting further and further.

"He killed my parents," he said again. "How does that have anything to do with — sound ideas, or whatever? My mother was ... was Muggle-born, like you said; does that make it alright?"

Watcher Draco could see the moment during which his younger self hesitated and then decided to plough on.

"My father says ... he went too far, but it was in the right direction. He says that the purebloods needed a voice of power and the Dark Lord understood that. He says that to be powerful and respected, you have to be feared, and you can't hesitate or be squeamish about acting on your ideals."

Potter's face was quite red by now.

"Really?" he said. "Well _my_ father is dead, but I bet he would have said that yours was talking a load of _crap_."

Sieve Draco's face tightened.

"Take that back," he said.

"No," Potter said. "You just said that Voldemort was right to try to _murder_ me when I was a baby."

Draco looked just the tiniest bit uncertain. "I ... didn't," he said. "But if I did, well, maybe it's true!"

"Er ..." Zabini said.

"Sometimes you have to do things everybody else is afraid to do!"

Potter curled his fists on his crossed legs. "I'm so sorry I didn't die, then," he said. "I'm sure that would have made you happy, Malfoy!"

He stared at Draco for a second longer, his eyes fierce and just a little bit too bright. Then he grabbed the curtains hanging in folds at the headboard of his bed and shoved them jerkily closed around him.

Nott looked uncomfortable and Zabini a little thoughtful as they silently got ready for bed. Crabbe was frowning and Goyle looked upset. Sieve Draco didn't look at anybody. He sat on his bed in a visibly black mood, white-faced and tense and completely miserable.

A slide took him away from the scene as Zabini extinguished the bobbing witch lights around the walls.

*

It was another Hogwarts corridor when the slide stopped. Near the first flight of stairs up to the Astronomy Tower, Draco thought.

There were three boys sitting against the wall, their legs sprawled out into the corridor and leaving only a narrow walkway for anybody who wanted to get past them. Their bags were tossed haphazardly around them, books spilling out of the one nearest Draco.

There were about fifty chocolate frog cards spread out before them in rows.

"Who was Leda, then?" Potter asked, frowning. Nott leaned forwards to swap two cards around and then squinted at them and swapped them back.

"Greek swan animaga," Zabini said. "There's a legend that says that she actually — you know — with another swan, once."

"What's an animaga?"

"_Animagus_," Nott said. He threw Zabini a quelling look. "Nobody says animaga. Zabini's just showing off his Latin. And it's a wizard who can turn themself into an animal. They say the Transfiguration professor here is one."

Zabini shrugged. "Well, anyway, I don't think you need to worry about learning that far back. The only reason I know is because my mother read the classics to me at home."

"No, Leda's good," Nott said. "She has rarity value; I've seen her go for nine sickles, once or twice."

The small toga-clad figure batted lazy eyelashes at him from the card.

Potter watched her, fascinated.

Zabini reached around him to thwack Nott on the arm. "Don't be an idiot," he said. "He wants to learn about the wizards, not how to trade them."

"He wants to learn about wizarding culture," Nott corrected. "Chocolate frog card trading is part of it."

"Well, alright." Potter moved Leda to one side and picked up the next card. He grinned at whatever the wizard on it was doing and then looked around. "Did we eat all the chocolate frogs?"

Nott scrabbled around near his bag and finally levered himself up off the floor. He clenched his hand around something under a fold of his robes. "Hah!"

Potter looked at the maimed and dusty chocolate frog the other boy held out for him, squirming in his hand. He hesitated and then shook his head.

"Er, no thanks."

Zabini reached past him and took it. "My mother says dust is good for the immune system," he said, mumbling around the chocolate in his mouth.

"Potter, another piece of general knowledge," Nott said. "Mrs Zabini is completely round-the-twist. She enjoys eating dust and killing her husbands in her spare time."

"Oy!" Zabini thwacked him again and Nott laughed, cradling his arm. "The husband thing's never been proven," Zabini said. He looked singularly unbothered by the accusation, though, and Draco wondered suddenly what he really thought about it. Maybe he honestly didn't care. It wasn't as though he ever had time to become attached to any of his stepfathers, after all.

His stomach was aching a bit, because the three of them looked so comfortable — the hard stone floor notwithstanding — and because he wasn't there.

Except that then he was.

The three boys on the floor looked up at the sound of footsteps ringing on the stone and Potter tensed. Sieve Draco was flanked by Crabbe and Goyle and it took a moment for them to notice the others. When they did they hesitated; slowed.

"Potter," Draco said. He nodded at the others. He didn't sound anything much, except uncertain. Crabbe and Goyle gave uneasy nods too.

"Malfoy," Potter said. He sounded unfriendly.

Zabini leaned back against the wall, boneless and relaxed as a cat. He was the only one who looked to be enjoying himself.

"Crabbe left his planisphere up at the Astronomy Tower last night," Draco said eventually. "We're going to get it."

Potter made a noncommittal sound. He was still holding the chocolate frog card. He put it down now and Watcher Draco saw that it was Morgan Le Fey. She apparently had something snarled in the back of her complicated lace collar and she was almost tying herself into a knot trying to get it out.

"What are you doing?" Sieve Draco asked eventually.

"None of your business," Potter said. "Nothing that will kill me, which I'm sure will disappoint you."

Draco flushed, uneven spots of pink high in his cheeks. "That's ridiculous," he said. "You're being ridiculous."

Potter stood up, slowly.

"_I'm_ being ridiculous? You said that Voldemort was right to try to murder me. Are you trying to apologise now, or are you just ...?"

"Malfoys don't apologise." Draco drew himself up taller.

"Then you can get stuffed," Potter said. His eyes were bright and strained and a bit desperate looking and Draco wanted to tell his younger self that Potter didn't mean it, couldn't he see that, he just wanted Draco to say sorry. Only Potter did mean it, of course, because Draco wasn't going to say sorry, because Malfoys didn't.

"Come on," Potter said, looking back at Nott and Zabini. "Let's do this in the common room."

Sieve Draco looked stung. "Don't bother," he said. "We were just going."

He led Goyle and Crabbe on, deliberately stepping on the chocolate frog cards as he went. Nott looked annoyed but Zabini was still grinning lazily. "Our dorm is going to be fun," he said.

Draco felt himself fading away, back into the library and the real world.

This was getting unbearably depressing.

*

There was a commotion in the halls on their way back to the dorm from the library; Draco scowling and dragging his feet and avoiding talking to Crabbe or Goyle. They all craned to look, Draco reluctantly and Crabbe and Goyle with relief.

People were chattering excitedly and it took a moment for Draco to see through them.

Potter was being supported by Weasley and Granger, white-faced and grimacing. Granger looked anxious but also excited and Weasley just looked excited. He was bouncing a bit as he walked and jarring Potter who would wince each time and then smile a faint, strained smile at him.

There was a dark stain down one side of his robes, over his ribs.

Draco bit his lip. _Of course it's Potter who gets injured. Three of them go out and it's Potter who comes back with blood on his robes. He probably told them to stay back while he went ahead and the bloody idiots_ let _him._

Potter looked around, the strain on his face obvious, and caught sight of Draco. For a moment there was a decidedly odd expression on his face. Then Granger jostled him on his other side and he winced, looking away again.

Then Madam Pomfrey was there, brusque and competent, shooing the other students away. She took the arm that Granger was supporting, brushing the girl aside and telling her to go get cleaned up and stop making such a fuss in the hall. Granger nodded. She cast an anxious look at Potter and gave him a pat on the shoulder but Draco could see that her smile was still trying to break through.

As she turned he caught sight of a flash of gold; something in her inner robe pocket. He almost thought it could have been a goblet, although that seemed a little random. They'd obviously just had a triumph of some sort, but — would they be triumphant about bringing home a drinking implement?

Maybe that wasn't what it had been.

He followed Potter with his eyes as far as he could still see him, but Pomfrey was bustling him away fairly quickly.


	4. Chapter 4

The rumour mill the next day said that Potter was fine but would be staying in the hospital wing for a couple of days — Draco figured it must feel like a second home to him by this point and refused to think any more about it. Rumour also said that Granger and Weasley were as pleased about something as a pair of Kneazels in a cream bowl and that Weasley had developed a habit of punching the air and muttering, 'Take _that_, Snakeface.'

Meanwhile, Draco had thought of another If. Crabbe and Goyle gave him doubtful looks when he told them.

"Are you sure you don't want to ... give up?" Crabbe asked.

Draco glared.

"Right. Okay."

He wrote it carefully on a piece of parchment: _If Draco Malfoy chose to go along to Harry Potter's meeting about a defence against the dark arts club, in their fifth year at Hogwarts._

The tilt as the sieve pulled him in was a familiar feeling by now.

 

__

If

"You can't tell me you aren't at least curious, Parkinson."

Draco blinked in the sudden sunlight and then hurried to catch up with the small knot of students who had already moved past him. Sieve Draco was still talking to Pansy. Crabbe and Goyle trailed behind.

"My father hasn't told me anything about ... you know, what happened, except that Potter was there. No matter how much of a git he is, you have to be as curious as I am about what he'll say about it."

Pansy was fidgeting with her prefect badge as she walked, twisting it over and over.

"Draco, we're going to be the only Slytherins. And you know what people are whispering: the idiot wants to set up some kind of personal militia or something. And Granger will be bossing everyone and trying to hint that it's in everyone's best interests to get down on one knee and swear fealty to Harry Potter. I don't want to go."

"Parkinson —"

Her voice was rising. "It's probably against school rules and I'll lose my prefect badge and you _know_ that's the only reason my mother isn't still sulking about my marks. I don't know why I let you talk me into things."

"You said it would be fun!"

She scowled. "I wish I'd brought my girls."

They were in Hogsmeade, close to The Hog's Head. They turned into the side-street as Pansy spoke and she lapsed into silence. Then she made a determined sort of face, elaborately threw her arm around Draco's waist, and leaned into him. "Alright, I'm ready," she said.

Sieve Draco rolled his eyes and moved his arm to accommodate her. Watcher Draco noticed that he had to pause for a second on the threshold, though, before he had the nerve to enter.

Crabbe and Goyle followed.

It took a moment for Draco's eyes to adjust to the sudden gloom, lighted inadequately by grimy windows and dirty, rather evil-looking candle stubs on the tables. By the way the four fifth years had paused in front of him, he guessed they were adjusting too. Or maybe they were unnerved by the sudden silence and the press of gazes.

Apparently they were late.

There were about thirty students crowded into the tables on one side of the room, around Potter, Granger and Weasley. A couple were seventh years and there was a runty little Gryffindor who Draco thought would have been a third year at that stage, but most were fifth years like Sieve Draco — and like Potter, of course. Granger had been talking when they came in, half-kneeling on her chair so that everybody could see her, but she trailed off as the door swung open and thirty odd pairs of eyes turned to Draco and the others.

Sieve Draco pasted a sneer onto his face and jerked his head at Crabbe and Goyle, who ploughed a path through the gaping students and turfed Finch-Fletchley, Macmillan, Abbott and Bones off their table. The Hufflepuffs scrambled back, still staring, and Draco and the others sat down. Draco put his polished shoes up on the table and leaned back with his arms behind his head.

"Do carry on, Granger," he said. "It sounds fascinating."

She shut her mouth with a snap and narrowed her eyes.

"What are you doing here, Malfoy?" Her eyes strayed to Pansy and, impossibly, became even less friendly. "Parkinson," she added. Apparently Crabbe and Goyle weren't even worth acknowledging, which Watcher Draco found irked him.

Potter had got over his surprise too. He scraped his chair back and stood, his whole face a thundercloud.

"Yes, Malfoy," he said. "What _are_ you doing here? Come to spy for Umbridge?"

"Harry, I told you, we're not breaking any rules," Granger murmured. Potter ignored her.

Sieve Draco raised his eyebrows and probably only Watcher Draco could see the tense line of his shoulders. It was difficult to keep up a relaxed sprawl when you wanted to leap to your feet and clench your fists. Draco generally didn't manage to keep it up very long but so far he was doing admirably.

"You're a bit thick, Potter," he said. "What do you think I'm doing here?"

Pansy flicked her hair back and sat up straighter, the line of her back a sharp contrast to Draco's sprawl beside her. "We want to hear whatever you're going to say, Potter," she said in a jagged, unpleasant voice. "Just get on with it, will you?"

Potter made outraged gulping noises.

"I'm not — I wouldn't — I'm not talking to _Malfoy_!"

"What do you think you're playing at, anyway?" Weasley demanded, red-faced. "You're not welcome here, so just shove off."

"Too bad." Draco gave him a stone-wall expression. "We're not going anywhere."

The rest of the students were getting over their surprise too, now, and beginning to whisper. Gryffindor's Diabolical Twins got to their feet at this point and gave Draco and the others ugly leers.

"We could throw you out," one of them offered.

"Look —" (Smith, this time, the Hufflepuff chaser) "— can we get on with this? You're just stalling because you don't want to tell us anything, aren't you?"

Draco suspected his Sieve self would have been gleeful about the identical outraged expressions on Potter, Weasley and Granger's face, if he hadn't been so busy defending against all the hostility.

"Who are _you_?" Weasley demanded.

Smith raised his chin. "Zacharias Smith," he said. "And I want to know what evidence Granger was basing it on when she said You-Know-Who's back a minute ago."

"NOT UNTIL SOMEONE THROWS MALFOY OUT!" Potter shouted. Sieve Draco leaned back. Watcher Draco felt a stab of contempt as he saw the wary, frightened looks Granger and Weasley threw at Potter. Honestly, didn't they know to call him on it when he was being a prat?

There was a moment's silence. Then, "Hey, we said we'd do it," the Weasley twin said.

Pansy was stiff with tension and darting accusatory looks at Draco. Who looked a lot less relaxed than he had. Crabbe looked stolid enough — he was good at that — but Goyle looked as though he wanted nothing more than to be out of that pub. Watcher Draco fumed on his Sieve self's behalf. God, the whole lot of them were _wankers_.

A placid voice spoke through the thickening tension. "You can't do that."

It took a moment for Draco to locate the source. His eyebrows rose. That crazy Ravenclaw girl from the year below him had stopped staring dreamily into space and was now staring dreamily at the Weasley twins.

"They're not doing anything," she explained. "Irrational anger attracts Wrackspurts, you know."

"She's right," Anthony Goldstein interrupted. "Er. Not about the Wrackspurts, necessarily —" he gave the crazy girl an apologetic look "— but about Malfoy and the others not having done anything. If they just want to hear what you have to say, Harry, then they've as much right to be here as anybody else."

Watcher Draco remembered rather liking Goldstein at prefect meetings.

Sieve Draco threw Potter an insolent look and leaned back again. Watcher Draco saw him surreptitiously squeeze Pansy's arm. "So, you were saying?" he said.

Potter stared at him for a moment longer, anger still vibrating in every line of his body. Then he let his breath out in an explosive sigh and dropped back into his seat. "Fine," he said. "Brilliant. Great." He looked around the other students, stopping at Smith.

"You wanted to know what the proof is that Voldemort's back," he said. Watcher Draco suppressed the shiver that wanted to run through him, only marginally comforted that everybody in the If seemed just as discomforted. The Ravenclaw girl next to their house seeker actually slopped her drink onto herself.

Potter made a face. "And I suppose that's what the rest of you are here for, too," he said.

"No, Potter," Sieve Draco said. "It's because you're such an inspirational speaker. Just tell us what happened when Diggory died, would you?"

Potter's face twisted. "What, Daddy won't tell you?" he demanded. Draco whitened but Potter had already turned away. "Dumbledore told the whole school what happened," he said. "If you didn't believe him, you won't believe me, and I'm not wasting an afternoon trying to convince anyone."

"Dumbledore told us _nothing_," Draco said. He sounded angry now, all pretence at relaxation dropped. "That the Dark Lord had you and Diggory in his power and it was the pureblood Hufflepuff he chose to kill? That's insane, Potter, even by Dumbledore's standards."

Potter went still. "You don't give a damn, Malfoy," he said, his voice low. "I remember what you said on the train last year. You don't care that he died, you just want _details_."

Draco remembered what he'd said on the train, too. God, he'd been so fucking confused. He'd raised his glass to Diggory at the feast (not to Potter, of course, because nobody could expect him to do that). He'd been sorry he died, with a kind of odd empty feeling in his stomach. He wasn't even sure _why_, since he'd never even talked to Diggory, but he supposed he'd felt some sort of connection to him after walking around with his name on a badge all year. And then he'd got his father's Owl that night, the one that had changed _everything_, telling him that he'd lied to him when he was growing up. That the Malfoys had been for You-Know-Who the first time round and they were again. Draco should be proud. His second rise would be glorious. The Malfoys would be great by his side.

There was no mention of what Dumbledore had told them, that You-Know-Who had just killed a boy Draco rather admired.

Sieve Draco shrugged. "Whatever."

Potter took a breath and turned to the others again.

"Cedric died because he was in the wrong place and I lived because I was lucky," he said. "That 's all. If you've come to hear exactly what it looks like when Voldemort kills someone I can't help you. I don't want to talk about Cedric Diggory, alright? So if that's what you're here for, you might as well clear out."

The Ravenclaw girl beside Chang shifted in her seat but nobody moved to leave.

Granger cleared her throat. "So," she said, her voice a little higher than usual. "Does everybody, er, agree that we want to learn defence? Proper practical defence?"

There was a sort of shuffling as people dragged their attention away from the juicy conflict that had been unfolding and focused on the more mundane topic of defence against the dark arts.

"Is it true that you can produce a Patronus?" Bones asked Potter (from her new table with Abbott, Finch-Fletchley and Macmillan at the back of the crowd).

"Yeah," said Potter.

"A corporeal Patronus?" she asked, shaking her plait over her shoulder.

Potter frowned. "Er — you don't know Madam Bones, do you?" he asked.

Watcher Draco rolled his eyes. Did he not even know her name? The Slytherins didn't share any classes with Hufflepuff but Draco at least knew his year-mates' _names_. And also, how was that question in the least relevant?

Bones just smiled, though. "She's my auntie," she said. And then, since it was obvious Potter didn't know (self-absorbed git), "I'm Susan Bones. She told me about your hearing."

Draco remembered the blank feeling when his father mentioned the hearing and the possibility that Potter might not be at school any more.

"So — is it really true?" Bones asked. "You make a stag Patronus?"

"Yes."

There was a susurrus of interest.

"Blimey, Harry!" Lee Jordan gave an impressed whistle. "I never knew that!"

Watcher Draco wondered whether Jordan paid any attention at all when he commentated at matches, given that Potter had sent a huge silvery stag charging at Draco, Crabbe, Goyle and Flint in the middle of a _game_ in third year.

More people clamored questions now and Watcher Draco had to admit that it sounded an impressive list, totted up like that. Slaying a Basilisk (when he was twelve, honestly, who did that?), retrieving mystical stones, flying against dragons, rescuing friends from merpeople (although Draco wasn't sure that last one really counted. Merfolk were tetchy bastards, but they hadn't been _threatening_ the champions. He knew; Bulstrode had enchanted a mirror so that the fourth year Slytherins could see what was going on under the water).

The last addition had come from Chang, with the result that Potter was now struggling between flushed and stuttering embarrassment and overwhelming smugness.

Watcher Draco was irritated. Had he ever been that obvious about liking someone? He didn't think so. The way Potter wore his emotions blazened across his face like that almost hurt to watch.

Or maybe it just contrasted too strongly with the glare of distrust he produced every time he noticed Sieve Draco.

Draco's Sieve self wasn't saying anything at all. He hadn't, Watcher Draco realised, since they left the topic of Diggory. Pansy leaned forward at his side, interested despite herself — occasionally throwing in a snarky comment — but Draco wasn't saying a word.

Potter was trying to be modest, now, and making a complete mess of it.

"Are you trying to weasel out of showing us any of this stuff?" Smith demanded. Sieve Draco lifted his head and gave him an appreciative look.

Weasley told him to shut his mouth and both Dracos rolled their eyes.

Smith flushed. "Well, we've all turned up to learn from him and now he's telling us he can't really do any of it."

Draco had always known the Diabolical Twins were perverts. They pulled out a gleaming metal pronged stick and offered to insert it in one of Smith's orifices. Smith turned green and leaned back a little.

Pansy sniggered and whispered something to Draco, who smirked and mouthed the words "Not fussy" back at her.

Granger was trying to drag the conversation back out of the gutter.

"Yes, well, moving on," she said hastily, "the point is: are we agreed we want to take lessons from Harry?" She looked around, bright and expectant.

"Don't be stupid, Granger," Sieve Draco drawled.

People whose mouths had been open to say _Yes_ closed them again in surprise.

Granger frowned. "Malfoy, you don't have to be involved," she said. "I'm sure we'd be glad if you weren't, actually."

He threw her a brief sneer and then looked at everyone else. "Look, yeah, I'm sure we'd all like to learn the Patronus charm —" his tone gave the impression that personally he thought Patronuses were kiddy stuff that nobody would _really_ want to learn "— and Potter can probably give everyone some tips on combat and fighting basilisks — because we all know how often that comes up — but you people can't seriously believe that he's the _only_ one here with anything to teach?"

He looked around and a couple of people — mostly Ravenclaws — began to look a little thoughtful. He lifted his chin. "I _know_ that there are techniques that only Slytherins know," he said. "And honestly, there are NEWT students here. Can't they teach the rest of us what they learned last year?"

"We did learn some neat hexes last year," the Gryffindor Quidditch captain said slowly. She nudged the girl next to her. "Didn't we, Alicia? All that defensive mirror magic? That could come in pretty handy if you were trying to confuse your opponent."

"Guest lecturers," Chang said suddenly. She smiled. "Every second or third lesson someone different could teach something only they know. Marietta and I did learn some good stuff for our OWLS last year." The curly-haired girl next to her shot her an alarmed look and immediately denied that she would ever stand up and teach anybody _anything_.

Chang waved a hand, unfussed. "Well, whatever," she said. "I'm sure there'd be enough people who'd be interested."

Potter was staring at her. He looked as though he'd been kicked in the stomach. Then she gave him a starry-eyed smile and said, softly, "I still think Harry should be the main teacher, though. Nobody else has done what he has."

Potter's eyes glazed a little and he looked away, his cheeks flushed and his face immeasurably more cheerful.

Granger still looked doubtful. She kept shooting Draco distrustful little glances.

"Well, I ... I guess," she said. "I only really meant for it to be Harry when I thought of it ... but I guess if people ... really want ..." She trailed off and gave Potter a pleading look. "Uh, Harry?"

He waved his hand. "Sure, yeah," he said. "I don't think I want to learn anything that _Malfoy_ could teach me, but if Angelina or whoever wants to teach sometimes, I don't mind." He was obviously still too pleased by Chang's compliment to really care.

Granger relaxed. She gave a bright smile. "Well, then," she said. "The next question is how often we do it."

Darkness faded in and Draco was sliding.

*

It felt like a longer slide than usual. Draco stumbled when he felt his feet touch solid ground again. He cracked his eyes open.

A wide room; mats and cushions scattered around the floor. He'd only seen it looking like this once — when Umbridge had he and the others prowl around looking for clues after the broken up DA meeting — but he recognised the Room of Requirement.

There was a familiar looking parchment with a list of names on the wall nearest to him. He took a few steps towards it until he could make out his own name about two thirds of the way down. It gave him an odd feeling.

Apparently the meeting was over, since people were drifting out of the opened door in twos and threes. Draco saw his own white-blond head over near the door, talking animatedly and with lots of sharp hand movements to Goldstein and Boot. Crabbe and Goyle stood in a huddle a few paces away, peering at something in Goyle's hand.

Sieve Draco shifted uncomfortably, one hand reaching to rub at the back of his neck as though he could feel somebody staring at him. A quick glance around told Watcher Draco who it was.

Weasley and Granger were bickering about something as Granger levitated cushions back to neat piles along the walls. Weasley was nominally helping her, although his cushions seemed for the most part to be bouncing along the floor, knocking Granger's off-course. Potter stood a little apart. He stared intently at Draco.

Watcher Draco followed his eyes back to his fifth year self, back to Potter again, trying to work out what he was thinking. He couldn't make out much from Potter's expression. A bit of a frown, but mostly it was just that _intentness_. That impression that Potter was so focused on Draco he didn't even know that his friends were arguing behind him, or that Granger had just halted the wild trajectory of one of Weasley's cushions an inch from the back of his head.

Draco finished talking to the Ravenclaw boys and drifted over to Crabbe and Goyle. He leaned over to see what they were looking at, one hand on Crabbe's back, and laughed.

Potter's frown deepened.

Crabbe straightened and said something and Draco's mouth twitched into a wicked grin. He ran a hand through the pale mess of fringe that had fallen into his eyes, probably tangled from the duelling practice they'd been doing. Potter followed the movement with his eyes.

Watcher Draco wondered whether he was aware he'd done that. Then he wondered why he'd even noticed. He frowned, turning back to the three Slytherin boys, and saw them catch up with Pansy and Bulstrode. All five headed towards the door.

Potter turned, caught another cushion as it barrelled towards him, and said something to Granger and Weasley. Granger stopped telling Weasley off long enough to give him a narrow look.

Potter was already gone, hurrying towards the door.

Watcher Draco followed him out of the room.

"Malfoy."

Pansy fell silent and Sieve Draco turned. He gave a bit of a nod — not much, but enough to acknowledge him.

"Potter."

"I want to talk to you."

Pansy's lips twitched. "If you get invited to a slumber party without us, Draco, I'm going to be miffed."

Potter stared at her for a moment and then seemed to realise that he was still holding the soft cushion tucked under one arm. He flushed, bending to put it down against the wall of the corridor.

Sieve Draco rolled his eyes. "Shut it, Parkinson."

She flashed him a smile. "Well, come on then," she said, pulling a curious Bulstrode and a reluctant Crabbe and Goyle after her.

Sieve Draco sent a dark look after her, faint pink areas appearing on his cheeks. He leaned back against the corridor wall and gave Potter a questioning look.

"I —" Potter hesitated.

Draco raised his eyebrows.

"That wasn't a bad technique that Millicent Bulstrode showed us last week," Potter said finally.

Draco stared.

"The wand swish that makes it look like you're casting _Protego_ when it's actually _Petrificus Totalus_, I mean."

"I, er, think she'd prefer it if you told her that yourself, you know," Draco said.

Potter went a bit red. "Er ..."

He flicked his wand a bit, not looking at Draco. Watcher Draco wondered if he knew how many wizards lost a finger fiddling with their wands like that.

"I do actually have a Charms essay to write," Draco said eventually.

"Yeah. Look ..." Potter looked up. "It — I just don't _get it_, Malfoy. Why you're here and why ... I didn't think you'd come along last week; after I named your father in that interview. I thought you'd be furious."

Watcher Draco raised his eyebrows, working out the date. No wonder the slide had felt longer, if this much time had passed. That _Quibbler_ interview had come out in February, just after the Valentine's Day Hogsmeade Weekend.

Sieve Draco scowled.

"I didn't like you dragging my father into that ridiculous magazine," he said. "I don't appreciate gossip about my family, especially not in some conspiracy rag alongside Cornelius Fudge's army of Wrackspurts or whatever it was Lovegood's father dreamed up."

Potter gave him a long look. "But you're not angry about what it was saying," he said. "That your father was there in the graveyard with Voldemort."

Draco hesitated. "Potter," he said. "Have I ever ... given you the impression ... that I wanted to keep father's connection to the Dark Lord secret? Because I have these memories of telling you several times that you'd chosen the losing side."

Potter didn't look angry. He scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck, frustrated. "But Nott didn't come last week," he said. "Or this week either. And neither did Zabini and I didn't even name his father. I don't even know who his father is."

Sieve Draco's face twisted a little. "Nott sees things differently to me," he said.

Watcher Draco remembered the fight they'd had. Theo had been so upset about the interview. He'd almost been crying as he said: _He made a mistake and he's trying so hard to protect Mother and me from the consequences of it. And now everyone will think of him as some kind of crawling Death Eater who just wants to kiss the Dark Lord's robes ..._ Draco had just been angry, so angry because it implicated Lucius, that _crawling Death Eater_. They'd not spoken for three days and Pansy had come close to hating Draco every time she saw them both in the common room, Nott's eyes shadowed and angry and scrunched up.

"Really," Potter said, when it became obvious Sieve Draco wasn't going to say anything more.

"I trust my father," Draco added. "Do you think I'd question him? Do you think my _mother_ would support him if he'd made a mistake? I trust him."

"But he's _wrong_."

There wasn't even the shadow of a doubt on the fifth year Draco's face as he gave a superior smile and said, "Whatever you need to tell yourself, Potter."

Watcher Draco wanted to shake him.

It looked as though Potter wanted to shake him too, if the way he was grinding his teeth was indicative.

"What are you doing here, Malfoy?" he demanded. "I don't get it. I don't get _you_. I always thought you just liked — but the way you act with Crabbe and Goyle, like you're actually _friends_, I always thought because you talked to them like — and the way you sounded when you mentioned your mother — I don't _get_ it. And I don't get why you're _here_, in the DA, if you're so sure your dad's on the right side."

Draco shook his head. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"_How can you ask that?_" Potter looked down and shook his head, shaggy fringe whipping like a dog with a bone. "It's called _Dumbledore's Army_. It's about learning to defend against _Voldemort_."

Draco winced. "I fought against that name," he said. Then he shrugged. "Anyway, it might be about some grand struggle against the Dark Lord for you, Potter, but for me it's just about not letting the rest of my OWL year learn duelling techniques without me."

There was an odd expression dawning on Potter's face; almost like wonder.

He opened his mouth and then closed it again; opened it once more. "It's not real for you at all, is it?" he asked. He shook his head, not needing an answer. "It's just ... you think it might not ever matter; you don't even take it seriously."

Sieve Draco looked uneasy. "What are you talking about?" Watcher Draco could tell how much he hated to ask the question.

"The _war_," Potter said. "With Voldemort. You're not ... it's been real for me for _ever_, since first year. But you've never seen any of the stuff I've seen. I always thought ... hell, Malfoy, I thought you understood."

"I understand plenty, Scarface."

"You don't." Potter looked inexplicably happy about this. "I always assumed you'd bought into the whole thing — that you _believed_ in it."

Draco gave him a wary look and Potter shrugged.

"I thought you were on the other side."

"I _am_ on the other side, you mental incompetent," Draco said. "Didn't you hear what I said before?"

He didn't understand. Watcher Draco could tell. The real Draco knew what Potter was getting at; sixth year had taught him how something could become real. But the fifth year Draco honestly didn't get it.

Apparently Potter had thought it was always real for him, though, as much as it was for himself. That he'd sold his soul to everything Dark and nasty at the age of eleven or something. Watcher Draco wanted to sneer at him, except that the expression on Potter's face was doing something odd and uncomfortable to his chest.

The last people from the DA meeting passed them in a clump. Granger and Weasley slowed and waited for Potter at the end of the corridor. Watcher Draco noticed that Cho Chang shot Potter a self-conscious look as they passed, but Potter didn't seem to even notice her. He remembered the rumours about their one disastrous date on Valentine's Day. It looked as though it had gone just as badly this time around.

The curly-haired girl walking at Chang's side took her arm and steered her bossily back into their conversation. Draco had an idea that she'd been the one who'd betrayed the DA, now that he looked at her again. He wondered if the possessive arm over Chang's might be a clue as to why she'd done it. He hadn't quite understood that at the time, since she had to know she was getting herself into trouble too, not to mention making a pariah of herself, since even without Granger's malicious little SNEAK hex she must have known it would get out that it had been her.

He was so caught up in speculations that he almost missed Potter's grin as he turned, with a "Well, seeya," towards his friends. He looked as though he'd just won something a little bit brilliant.

Watcher Draco hadn't worked out why when the scene faded into darkness.

*

"Psst, Potter!"

Draco was beginning to get dizzy with all this sliding.

Potter was walking with Granger and Weasley up a corridor that led from the Potions classroom towards the Great Hall. All three turned around at the hiss and Granger's eyes narrowed speculatively. Weasley just looked tense.

"That space is far too small for all three of you to lurk in, you know," Potter said.

Sieve Draco stepped out of the small alcove, Crabbe and Goyle squeezing free behind him.

"We were not lurking," Draco said with dignity. "We just didn't want to be seen with _you_."

"Nobody's asking you to be seen with us," Weasley put in. Watcher Draco was surprised to notice that there didn't seem to be much heat in it.

Sieve Draco sneered at him and there wasn't much heat in that, either. "It's about Dorks Anonymous."

"For the last time, Malfoy, that is _not_ what it's called," Granger said over Crabbe and Goyle's snorts.

"What about it?"

Draco turned to look at Potter.

"I want to take part of tomorrow's lesson. I have a hex I want to teach everyone."

Weasley laughed. "Brilliant," he said. "Let's all learn dark curses. I think we're about ready to start on the Unforgivables, don't you, Harry?"

"Only if I can demonstrate on you," Draco drawled.

Potter interrupted. "Seriously, Malfoy, the DA isn't about learning dark hexes —"

"This isn't one," Draco said. "If the Weasel hadn't butted in I would have told you. It's called the _Null Inhibitus_ charm and it's not even officially a hex. It's so warm and fluffy they even use it in medical magic, for panic attacks. Madam Pomfrey used it on Parkinson once; that's where I learned it."

"So... what's the point, then?"

Draco grinned. "You'll see when I demonstrate it."

"No way," Weasley said. "No way are we letting him test out some hex in the DA that we've never even seen before."

Granger frowned. "Ron's right, Harry, you can't let Malfoy teach something you haven't seen to be sure it's safe."

Draco shrugged, pointed his wand at Potter and said, "_Inhibitus Nullius_."

"_Malfoy_!" Granger spun on her heel, glaring. He widened his eyes in faux innocence.

"What? You wanted a demonstration."

_"What did you do to him?_"

Potter shook his head, as though to clear it. He looked at Granger, frowning.

"Don't be so loud, Hermione." His tone was startlingly plaintive. "You're giving me a headache." He glared at her. Granger's face went blank.

"Your voice gets all shrill and squeaky when you're angry," Potter continued. "Like a really loud house elf." He paused. "Like this: _What did you do to him?_ Or maybe more like _WHAT did you do to him?_"

"I ... er ..." Granger looked as though she didn't know whether to be offended or worried. She glanced quickly at Draco, then back at Potter. "Are you feeling alright, Harry?"

But Potter seemed to be distracted by the need to get his angry elf Granger impersonation right. He was still trying out different voices, his voice loud in the still corridor.

"Blimey, Malfoy," Weasley said. "What _did_ you do to him?"

Sieve Draco looked smug. "Removed his inhibitions," he said. "Well, not removed, otherwise he'd probably be drooling and walking into walls." He paused. "No different from usual, then." Granger glared and he smirked. "Damped down his inhibitions, anyway. It's like being the drunkest you've ever been, but without the slurring and the falling over. You can't stop yourself from saying and doing _whatever_ you feel like doing." His eyes slid to Potter and widened. "Uh, apparently Potter feels like getting naked."

Granger spun around, as did Weasley. Goyle squeezed his eyes shut.

Potter wasn't getting naked but he was shrugging out of his school robes, frowning and tugging at them and then leaving them in a puddle of fabric on the stone floor. Luckily he was wearing those stiff Muggle trousers and a ratty shirt underneath. He stretched his arms luxuriously above his head. Then he stopped and glared at his own wrist.

"I hate Umbridge," he said, and his voice was dark and ugly now.

"I know," Granger said quickly. Out of the corner of her mouth she hissed at Draco, "_Take it off him, Malfoy_."

"Er ..." Draco said.

"But I hate Snape more," Potter said. "I really _hate_ him. Umbridge is an evil cow, but she doesn't know anything about me. Snape knows, he knows more than you and Ron do, even. He knows about the cupboard, and Dudley and his gang, and the graveyard, and everything. And he loves it, all of it."

"Harry, you need to stop talking," Granger said urgently. "Malfoy, take the hex off."

"I will NOT stop talking," Potter exploded. His cheeks were bright red and furious. "EVERYBODY wants me to stop talking, to pretend that Voldemort never even EXISTED. Well, he does, and he's in my —"

"_Silencio_!" Granger cried. "_Petrificus Totalus_!"

Weasley blinked and caught Potter's stiff body as it fell backwards.

"I'm sorry, Harry," Granger said. "But you didn't want to say that stuff. And we can't risk you going off and trying to murder Snape, either."

"Remind me why not?" Weasley muttered, staring down at Potter.

Granger ignored him and turned to Draco, who looked a bit shell-shocked. "You don't know the counterspell, do you?" she said.

"Er. No?" he said. "But it wore off Pansy by morning."

"Fine," Granger said through gritted teeth. "Ron, take Harry up to the dormitories and _make sure he doesn't talk to anybody_." Weasley looked as though he was opening his mouth to ask why but Granger beat him to it. "Oh, honestly, Ron, Harry has secrets that would be dangerous to a _lot_ of people if they got out and he doesn't know any better than to blab them at the moment."

Weasley nodded, cowed, and cast _Mobilicorpus_ on Potter's board-like body. He floated sideways as he rose, the tattered collar of his shirt falling back over the hollow of his collarbone.

Granger turned on Draco as Weasley left, her face dark. Draco raised his eyebrows.

"It's a good charm, isn't it?" he said. "All his defences were down — he couldn't even stop a _Silencio_."

"Malfoy —"

"Plus, did you notice that he didn't block against the charm in the first place? That's because it's essentially benign in nature — it's diametrically opposed to the Imperius curse, for example, because it gives you your free will. And everyone can sense benign magic, that's why people don't hex their friends' noses off when they unexpectedly cast a neatening spell or something on them."

"I know that, Malfoy, but —"

"It's brilliant, isn't it?"

She glared at him. "You're not teaching it to anyone until you know the counterspell." She spun on her heel.

*

The slide was short this time; the shortest so far. He wasn't in the same corridor but he was somewhere in the dungeons. By the length of the slide Draco assumed it was later the same night, but it must have been quite a few hours later: the torches were dimmed, which only happened after curfew. Since Draco's Sieve self was pacing along rather than skulking in the shadows, Watcher Draco assumed he was doing prefect rounds.

He had his wand out but he looked bored, as well as Draco could make out in the dimmed torchlight. Rounds had been exciting at the beginning of the year, when pulling rank over students caught out of bed had made it all worthwhile, but the sheer monotony of most prefectly duties had had Draco almost crying with boredom by Christmas. Pansy never seemed to get tired of it but Draco had found increasingly ingenious ways to get out of rounds. Apparently he'd failed tonight.

"There you are," somebody said, a low, pleased sound. Watcher Draco was almost as startled as the other Draco. Potter stepped out of the shadows and gave Draco a pleased smile that matched the pleased voice.

"Potter?" Draco hesitated. "I thought Weasley was supposed to tie you to your bed or something."

Potter shrugged. "I broke the jinx," he said. "I didn't want to stay in the dorm."

"So you came looking for me?"

"Yeah," said Potter. He stepped closer, frowning. "I'm not sure why."

"Really?" Draco asked. "I'm not sure either."

"Cho kissed me once."

Potter, king of the non sequitur.

"Um. You did go on a date with her on Valentine's Day. It's kind of traditional, you know."

Potter waved a hand. "No, not then," he said. "After DA once. Everybody had left. She kissed me, but it was all wet, because she was crying."

"Um."

Potter seemed to have got quite a bit closer. Watcher Draco moved a couple of steps nearer to them, curious about where Potter thought he was taking this. If he was thinking at all, that was. _Null Inhibitus_ was a powerful charm.

Potter moved closer still, his nose almost brushing Draco's cheek. Draco seemed to be frozen.

"She was sniffling and her lips were all shiny and wet," he said. His eyes flicked down to Draco's mouth and he said, in a soft echo of his earlier words to Granger, "Like this."

He leaned forward an extra inch and licked a stripe along Draco's lower lip.

Draco leaped back, nearly tumbling over his own feet.

"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, POTTER?"

Potter had his eyes closed, biting carefully at his lip. Watcher Draco jerked his eyes away and turned to his Sieve self. Who was still staring at Potter's mouth.

"The _Null Inhibitus_ has worn off, hasn't it? This is a joke, isn't it?"

Potter opened his eyes, slowly, and his gaze landed on Draco. His expression focused and he moved forward once more.

The real Draco, watching, had to close his mouth and remember to breathe. This wasn't — it didn't — since when did _Potter_ —?

Apparently Sieve Draco wasn't feeling either more coherent or more in control than he was, since he didn't do anything besides back into the wall when Potter pressed up against him and leaned forwards to lick at Draco's lips again. Potter made a kind of contented noise and leaned foward again, this time using his teeth to catch Draco's lower lip and nibble on it.

"Potter?" Sieve Draco asked faintly. "... I don't think I'm okay with this."

"Shhh," Potter said, pressing closer again, and Draco gave a gasp and bucked against him. His eyes were squeezed shut.

Potter was focused with total concentration on the other Draco's mouth, a completeness of concentration Watcher Draco hadn't ever seen in him except when he was going after the Snitch. He didn't ever chase the Snitch with his eyes closed, though. They were closed now; not squeezed shut like the Sieve Draco's, but drifting closed as though he couldn't keep them open anymore. Dark lashes fluttered on his cheeks like smudges as he moved his head, languidly, and Watcher Draco didn't know when he'd got close enough to them to count Potter's eyelashes.

Potter drew back, frowning a little, and opened his eyes.

"You haven't opened your mouth."

Sieve Draco blinked at him, dazed.

"Potter," he said after a moment. "You're going to hate yourself tomorrow. I promise you."

"No, I'm not," Potter said childishly. His frown got deeper. "I'm doing what I _want_, right? That's what the charm does? Well, I want to do this."

"You want to — Potter, you're _kissing_ me."

"No, I'm not," Potter said again. He grinned. "I would, but you're not opening your mouth."

"You don't want to kiss me." Draco sounded as though he was on the edge of hysteria. "How _long_ have you wanted to kiss me?"

"Don't know." Potter nuzzled at Draco's neck. "Didn't know that I wanted to."

He found Draco's ear and licked around the shell, making him shudder violently.

"Potter ..." he said, a desperate thread of sound.

"Mmm."

One of Potter's hands brushed the fine fringe out of Draco's face, carefully, intently. Draco stared at him for a moment, wide-eyed, and then as Potter bent towards his mouth again he moved. He shoved Potter forwards — and followed him, pushing both of them up against the far wall of the corridor. His hands found a death grip in the front of Potter's pyjama top and his tongue shoved into Potter's mouth and the sounds he was making were wounded and breathless.

Potter melted into the changed hold, his arms twisting around Draco's neck and his mouth falling open. There was that pleased sound again, a mumble of contentment, and Watcher Draco had the odd thought that if he could hear Potter make that noise in real life it might right something he hadn't guessed was wrong.

Sieve Draco had his hands clenched in the front of Potter's pyjamas, the grip pulling the soft flannel collar halfway down Potter's shoulder. He kissed hard and one of his hands uncurled almost as though he was unaware of it. His hand moved blindly over the soft, worn material of the other boy's pyjama top, shoving the tattered line of the hem up over his hip, his stomach, baring the winter-paled skin, starting to flush. Potter shivered at the contact and kissed back harder.

Watcher Draco was aware of a warm tingle breaking through him, a heat that was uncomfortable and delicious all at the same time. He couldn't take his eyes off the two boys in the corridor.

Potter's hands were wandering now, too, and — oh, _god_, he really didn't have any inhibitions, did he? — his hand was brushing low over the front of Draco's robes. Draco shuddered and dropped his forehead onto Potter's shoulder, panting. He pushed into the hand at the front of his robes, which was rubbing now, moving with increasing confidence. A whine escaped him. He moved to find Potter's mouth again and Watcher Draco thought he was lost to everything but that. He didn't pull back until he needed to breathe, panting and staring at Potter.

Who was panting too, and whose eyes were gaining a frightening clarity. He stiffened, his hand dropping, and drew the tiny space available away from Draco's body.

"Oh god," he said in a small voice.

Draco stepped back and Potter stumbled away, his face a study in mortification.

"Oh ... my god. I didn't ..."

He backed away a few more steps, wrapping his pyjama-clad arms around him. Then he dropped his arms and fled. The muffled slap of his footsteps took a second or so to fade.

Sieve Draco stared after him, still breathing hard. He turned and buried his face against the cold stone wall.

*

Draco was still dazed when the slide stopped, and shivering a bit, which meant he was unprepared enough to let out a yelp when a shining silvery otter dove through him the instant he opened his eyes.

"Argh!" He threw his arms over his face, only lifting them to blink owlishly around when nothing more happened. The otter was gambolling around in front of him now. He felt a small degree of embarrassment as he realised that it had been a Patronus.

By the fond air of ownership with which Granger was watching it from a few feet away, Draco guessed it was hers.

He looked around with interest. They were in the Room of Requirement, of course, but this time there was actually a DA lesson in progress. Granger's wasn't the only Patronus frisking about, although it was one of the solider ones. Brown was stamping her foot at her tiny whisps of silver and Crabbe was inspecting the sort of spinning amorphous ball he appeared to have produced with a mournful interest. There was an excited chatter filling the space.

Sieve Draco was watching his own cat Patronus, which was whipping its tail and spitting a bit, with absolute concentration. Only the flush on his cheeks betrayed how much he was _not_ looking at Potter, weaving through the practicing students. After a moment Potter came to a stop in front of Draco and bit his lip.

"Er ..."

Draco glanced up, then quickly back at his Patronus. It settled down as he watched and began cleaning its tail with sharp, satisfied little movements.

Potter looked at it too.

"Your Patronus is really good," he said.

Draco didn't look up. "Thanks."

"Malfoy ... Um. About ... um, last night?"

Potter was flushed and uncomfortable looking, but he kept sneaking glances at Draco to see if he was looking up.

"Mmhp." Sieve Draco seemed to be trying to produce the most noncommital sound that he could.

"I was ... um ..."

"Harry, I think I'm doing it!" Finnegan yelled from the other side of the room. Potter turned to look and Finnegan added, "Look — ah — it's gone ... but it was definitely something hairy, Harry!"

Draco's Patronus made a sudden leap and swiped at Granger's otter, who swept it aside with its tail.

"They _are_ sort of nice, aren't they?" Granger said fondly.

Potter began to turn back to Draco but he was distracted by the door opening and closing. Watcher Draco couldn't see why at first, until he realised that the people near the door were staring down at the figure of a house elf emerging at knee height from the crowd.

Draco had to drag his eyes down from the ten or so wooly hats balanced on top of each other, bobbing about on its head. He knew by the hats — the _clothes_ — who it was, of course, even before he saw the face with its wide, frightened eyes. It was the Malfoy house elf Potter had stolen in second year. Which he'd accomplished in some manner that Draco had always felt rather suspicious of. His father had hinted that he had been the victim of dire and darkly manipulative plans but he hadn't quite met Draco's eyes. Also, Draco knew Potter and he thought four year olds were probably more capable of dire and dark manipulation.

The elf was squeaking and trying to say something. Warn Potter about something and — oh. Right. Unless Draco missed his guess this was the evening Umbridge broke up the DA meeting and Dumbledore fled the school.

Potter stared in dawning horror down at the little elf, holding it by one shoulder and three hats to keep it from running into a wall.

"Dobby — she hasn't found out about this — about us — about the DA?"

Dobby looked terrified and guilty.

"Is she coming?"

"Yes, Harry Potter, yes!"

Watcher Draco noticed Millicent Bulstrode casually take down the list of names Granger had tacked to the wall and _Incendio_ it as she slipped towards the door.

Potter straightened and stared around. "WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?" he yelled. "RUN!"

Sieve Draco was trapped near the back of the crowd rushing to the door and was using his elbows to make headway. Watcher Draco slipped through the doorway in his wake, in time to see him pelting off in the direction of the Library, right on the heels of Dean Thomas and Ginevra Weasley. Weasley vanished around the corner just as Thomas caught his shoe on a deep crack in the flagstones and went sprawling. Sieve Draco had to grab at the wall to keep from falling over him. He looked up and saw the same thing Watcher Draco had just seen: Umbridge approaching at a trot, her pink bows bobbing obscenely.

Watcher Draco found himself yelling at him. "Improvise, you idiot!" He stared at his Sieve self, willing him to move. "Use Thomas! She's going to catch him anyway!"

Apparently Sieve Draco thought the same thing.

"Professor!" he called. "Hey, Professor — I've got one!"

"Draco?" She glanced at Thomas, slowly getting to his feet. "Oh, very good work! Montague must have found you after all!"

Sieve Draco smirked at her. Then his eyes slid past her to Harry Potter, who was standing with a wooly hat in his hand, staring at Draco. He looked shocked.

"Er, Potter —" Draco said. Potter's face hardened; the hurt disappearing as if it had never been there.

"Go to hell, Malfoy," he said. "Just — fuck you."

Umbridge was talking: taking points, gloating, dragging Potter by the arm. The scene darkened and pushed him out.

*

He came back to the library with a sick lurch, catching himself with his hands on the desk. He stared at the deeply scored graffiti on the desk between his splayed hands.

"Malfoy?"

He dropped his hands and ran.

Crabbe and Goyle found him in the bathroom opposite the library, on his knees, retching into the toilet bowl in one of the cubicles.


	5. Chapter 5

Draco didn't go to any of his classes the next day. He curled in his bed, avoiding looking at any of his dorm-mates, and said that he was sick.

The others must have made some excuse to the teachers, he supposed, since nobody came looking for him.

Crabbe and Goyle's twin horrified stares when they came back to change and he said he wasn't going to dinner either eventually changed his mind.

He regretted it as soon as he got there.

"Why didn't anybody tell me Potter was out of the hospital wing?" he hissed.

"Er ..." Crabbe said.

Goyle leaned over to Crabbe. "Did I miss something?" he whispered, worried.

Draco sank lower into his seat.

Potter didn't seem to have suffered for his stint in the hospital wing. He was chattering animatedly to Granger and Weasley, his elbows sprawled all over the table and into Longbottom's table space (who was cramping his elbows awkwardly as he tried to find room to eat). His cheeks were flushed with excitement; or maybe with warmth and food. His robes were rumpled and twisted. It probably never occurred to him to neaten up before dinner.

He looked up for a moment and caught sight of Draco. For a suspended moment his face was open and confused. Then the expression morphed into a glare and he looked pointedly away.

Draco squeezed his eyes shut, sinking even lower. His chin was barely above the table, now. Crabbe and Goyle looked down in astonishment.

The thing was that it _hadn't actually happened_. Potter didn't actually make pleased noises against his mouth in a dungeon corridor and then stand there, cold betrayal in his eyes, and tell him to go to hell.

Even if it had happened, it would have been two years ago.

"Malfoy?" Goyle gave a cautious glance around the hall and then back down. "Are you going to be sick again?"

"No." He eased himself up a bit. "Just ... Goyle, you go sit on the other side of the table. Right there. Just ... no, a little to the left. My left. No, that's still ... oh, alright, to the right, then."

The fourth year boys Goyle had just dislodged made faintly protesting grumbles, which stopped when Goyle looked at them. They scooted along .

Okay. Now Draco couldn't actually see Potter. This was better.

He cast a sound scrambling charm around the three of them — something as obvious as a silencing charm was asking for trouble — and straightened a little further.

"I want to ask you both something."

Crabbe looked expectant. Goyle was occupied in eyeing the glass of pumpkin juice he'd left over their side of the table. Crabbe passed it to him.

"I ..." This was actually more difficult than he'd expected. For the second time, Draco didn't know how to word something to Crabbe and Goyle.

"You remember fourth year, when the Durmstrang students were sitting at our table?" he asked finally.

They both nodded.

"Do you remember how I ... kind of followed Victor Krum around for a while?"

They nodded again.

"Right. Good. Uh ... how about in fifth year? Do you remember how I used to laugh at all Adrian Pucey's jokes, even when they weren't funny?"

More nods.

"Um. OK. And do you remember that time Greengrass threw her arms around me after we'd beaten Ravenclaw and tried to snog me and I hexed her hair into snakes?"

They were confident in their responses now. _They probably expect me to play this game all through dinner._

He took a breath.

"Did you ever think ... that I might be ...?"

He paused and they looked back at him with big, honest puzzlement. He tried again.

"I mean, that I might like ...?"

They carried on watching him.

"... never mind."

He noticed as they left the hall at the end of dinner that Potter was watching him again.

*

The Potterettes had gone back to planning now that the first excitement of whatever their triumph had been was over. Their heads were buried together every meal, their expressions increasingly serious and frustrated.

The frustrated expression on Potter's face deepened whenever he looked at Draco. Which was still quite a lot. And always seemed to end in a glower.

The Crush on Potter, which Draco was beginning to realise might have been there for a while — for all it felt as though it had knocked him down as he watched himself with Potter in the If — was making his life miserable. It kept surprising him with new, nasty little developments. At first it was a feeling as though someone was jumping up and down on his stomach whenever he saw messy hair and glasses. That was horrible — although he didn't throw up again after the first time. It began to fade after a couple of days, though, as the memory _Go to hell, Malfoy_ lost strength against the backdrop of school and his own solid reality.

The next worst was the layer under the kicked-in stomach one. It was the old feeling, really — looking at Potter and wanting — something. Aching. Even after the If it wasn't a defined want, but it was sharper, stronger.

The first two levels meant that it was a few days before he really noticed the third, horrifying dimension of the crush; which was maybe surprising, given the If scene that had sparked it. That was the first time he caught himself intently watching Potter's mouth as he talked.

Potter bit at his lip as he listened to something, the colour changing from red to white, then released it to laugh. It wasn't a laugh somebody who'd done what he had ought to have, Draco thought distantly. It was that delighted, unselfconscious laugh that small boys have. It made his whole face look unguarded and happy.

The messy fringe was falling over his eyes again and he blinked it away, still grinning, and rubbed a hand over the side of his neck. His hair was getting a bit long; tangled strands brushed against his collar and his neck with a whisper-soft rhythm that must have tickled. Rubbing at the skin had reddened it a little; a light flush over skin the summer tan was fading from.

Draco wet his lips, dry-mouthed. Then he realised what he was doing.

He looked up, dreading, to find Potter ignoring Weasley and Finnigan now to watch him with that same suspended openness he'd seen for a moment at dinner. Then it was the glower again, a determined anger; more than Potter had ever been able to keep up before this year.

Draco raised his eyebrows and gave him a half-hearted sneer before he turned away.

He didn't spend the next few minutes staring at nothing, lost in imagining Potter's mouth, his neck. He just happened to find this section of his textbook particularly fascinating.

*

Once he'd noticed the first time, he realised that it was something he did all the time. He must have been doing it for _ages_.

He might die of the embarrassment.

He caught himself sneaking looks at Potter's arse under his robe on Monday when he and Crabbe and Goyle found themselves behind Potter and his friends on the way to the greenhouses for Herbology. He stared raptly at Potter's fingers as he played with the Golden Snitch when he walked by the Gryffindor team practicing on Wednesday; until Ginevra Weasley glared at him and told him to buzz off and stop spying on their strategy. (Draco didn't personally think that Potter releasing and then catching the Snitch over and over again while Weasley and Thomas argued about why the Quaffle had flown wide was much of a strategy, but he didn't bother saying so.)

He couldn't step into the shower anymore without imagining Potter there, which he blamed on association: you had _one_ little fantasy about a place and the next thing you knew you remembered it every time you went in.

But it was realising that he was focusing intently on the little bit of skin between the black hem of Potter's robe and the top of his rumpled sock as he stretched his feet out in Potions that made him understand how bad it had become.

The worst of it was that Potter always seemed to catch him. He looked up from Potter's ankle to find the other boy watching him back, frowning.

He told Crabbe and Goyle that evening that he was using the sieve again.

*

They were a little hesitant about the If he'd chosen.

"Would Potter really do that?" Goyle asked, his forehead creasing.

Draco lifted his chin. The truth was that he was sick of seeing things that were his fault. He wanted to look at something that had been Potter's fault, indefensibly.

"Maybe," he said shortly.

He wrote: _If Harry Potter chose to apologise to Draco Malfoy after he almost killed him in a bathroom in their sixth year at Hogwarts._

He touched his wand to the silvery surface and the world tilted.

 

__

If

He had to blink a few times to adjust his eyes. Wherever he was, it was almost dark. There were a couple of witch lights bobbing on low glow along one wall but they didn't do much more than give shape to the dimness. He thought there was a large window in the wall opposite, too, but the overcast sky outside was only a little lighter than the room.

He spotted the row of beds along the wall under the window. The Hospital Wing. That made sense.

He moved closer. He'd been the only one in the Hospital Wing this night, he remembered. Not in the first bed, but ... yes, there.

He was seeing a lot more clearly now; well enough to see details of the sleeping form in the bed. It was — just a little bit unsettling, seeing himself like this. You could never make a Pensieve show yourself sleeping; nobody ever remembered what that looked like.

This was only a year ago — less, in fact. He didn't look young, particularly. He looked ... scared.

Draco glared at himself. He was lying there, curled partly to one side, his sleeping face scrunched up in pain and fear. He looked scared.

He didn't remember nightmares from that night, but then the whole experience was a grey sort of nightmare in his memory. Most of the year was like that, actually; after the first thrill of confidence when he'd been _sure_ he could do the task, sure it was the right thing to do.

The door of the hospital wing creaked open. There was a swish as somebody slipped inside but nothing visible. Then a whisper of fabric and something fell away, revealing Potter's form in a rush. The invisibility cloak.

Potter balled up the cloak and stuffed it into his pocket. He looked across at the still form on the bed for a moment, rocking between the balls and heels of his feet. Then he squared his shoulders.

"Going to do this," he whispered to himself.

_Not really convincing, Potter_, Draco thought after another minute had passed and Potter still hadn't moved.

Potter prowled forwards a few steps and peered cautiously down at the bed. He bit his lip, frowning a little. Draco wondered if he was seeing the same things Draco had seen when he looked down.

_I don't bite, you know_. And that wasn't a good thought to have, because Potter was frowning in indecision and making an indent in his lower lip and, actually, Draco would rather like to bite him.

Potter frowned and half extended his hand, as though he was going to touch Draco's forehead. He changed his mind and jabbed at Draco's shoulder under the coverlet.

There was a moment where the sleeping form went entirely still and Draco knew that he was awake and trying to work out what was happening without letting on. By the second half of sixth year almost every awakening had been like this: that moment of terror when he _knew_ it was almost impossible but he still wondered whether Voldemort had sent somebody for him: his Aunt Bella, or Macnair; or Greyback.

His eyelids cracked open, revealing a sliver of silver grey that caught the dim light. Potter rocked on his heels.

"Potter," the Draco in the bed said finally. His voice was scratchy and a bit uneven. "Come to finish me off? I wouldn't think you'd have the nerve to wake me up first."

Potter bit off the first answer he wanted to make. He took a breath. "Uh, no," he said.

Both Dracos waited but apparently that was all he had.

"Well, go away then," Sieve Draco said finally. "I hope you know that I'm going to do my best to have you expelled for this."

He hadn't, actually — he'd been more concerned with the cabinet and Dumbledore and his imminent death at the age of sixteen, along with that of his mother.

Potter gritted his teeth. "I came to apologise," he said. "Actually."

Draco pulled himself up to sit against the headboard, wincing a little. The blanket fell away to show the white gauze plastered over his chest and stomach. "For attempting to _murder_ me?" he demanded, his voice cracking again on _murder_.

"No! I didn't try to — I didn't know that was going to happen, alright?"

Draco did actually know that — had known it even then. The sheer panic in Potter's voice as he knelt next to Draco in the bathroom — next to Draco who was _sprawled in his own blood_ — couldn't have been faked.

Regardless, his younger self sneered at Potter from the bed. It was a shaky sneer but apparently Potter couldn't tell the difference. He flushed.

"I didn't," he said more quietly. "Really. I wouldn't have — Malfoy, how could you think I would try to kill someone?"

Draco looked away. "Just ... fuck off, Potter, okay?" he said finally.

Potter looked at him for a moment. He turned and fiddled with the window curtain, which was drawn most of the way back.

"Malfoy? Why did you try to cast Cruciatus at me?"

Watcher Draco jumped a little. He'd forgotten he'd done that. Apparently Sieve Draco had rather forgotten that part of the encounter, too, because he looked startled.

"You were annoying," he said after a pause.

Potter ignored that to look at Draco directly. His expression was an odd mix of earnest and distrustful. "At first I thought it didn't matter — the _Sectumsempra_; since it didn't kill you it didn't matter because you'd tried to cast Cruciatus. That's supposed to be unforgivable, no matter what. Only ... well, I've cast it, after all."

"You've _what_?" Draco pulled himself up straighter in the bed.

"There were reasons for it," Potter said coldly. Both Dracos gaped at him.

"But." Potter looked as though he had a certain amount of trouble saying this. "But you probably had reasons too. I talked to Hermione and she said — she pointed out that you couldn't have planned it. Because you had to know you'd be expelled, or arrested, or both probably. And ... well, really, Malfoy." He frowned at Draco. "It was kind of an overreaction, you know. I don't think you can have known what Cruciatus is like."

"And _you do_?" Draco demanded.

Potter shrugged. "I've been on both ends of it, so yeah. And it's a pretty big deal to cast just because you didn't like me seeing you crying."

Sieve Draco took a breath, his face tightening. His eyes hardened too.

"There is no _just because_, you stupid little prat. Do you know — do you have any idea what —? You have no idea, Potter. You have no idea at all what I'm dealing with." Watching, Draco could hear the unsaid words: _What I'm trying to do._

On the bed, Draco was white and — it was hard to tell in the pale light but Watcher Draco thought that he was shaking. "I don't know what you came here for. If you want — what? For me to forgive you for eviscerating me? Then you're insane. Just get out."

Potter was breathing through his nose by the end of this. "You're right, Malfoy," he said. "I don't know what you're up to. But I'm going to find out. I promise."

Draco sneered at him and turned to stare out of the darkened window, as though whatever he couldn't see was infinitely more interesting than the angry boy by his bed. Potter turned and walked quickly out, the invisibility cloak still tucked into his pocket. The door to the hospital wing swung closed behind him with a clack.

*

Draco came back to the library. Crabbe and Goyle looked at him hopefully; then backed away at his scowl.

_This isn't working._

*

Slughorn sent them into the Forbidden Forest on Friday afternoon. "If you're to be true Potions students — and I think some of you have the potential, my but I do —" and he winked at Potter, despite the fact that Potter had been abysmal in Potions all year "— then you'll need to recognise your ingredients outside of their jars."

They were looking for the ingredients for a calming draught. Draco doubted that all sixteen ingredients could be found in the forest but he supposed it gave Slughorn an excuse to lounge in his laboratory and catch up with his reading.

"This says powdered bluetop toadstools," Goyle said, looking up from their list. "Malfoy, I don't see any powders."

"We have to find them _unpowdered_, you idiot," Draco said. "Come on, they grow in dung. They'll be near the Thestrals. I think I remember the way."

"But we can't see Thestrals," Goyle said, catching up with him.

Draco rolled his eyes. "I can."

They got a bit lost but they found their way there eventually — more thanks to Crabbe's memory than to Draco's.

The first thing Draco saw as they entered the clearing was the leathery, reptilian Thestral chewing on a mangled piece of meat under the trees on the far side.

The second thing was Granger, balancing gingerly on her knees as she investigated a partly dried pile of dung with a stick. Weasley and Potter were hanging back a little, trying to look helpful without actually touching the dung. It smelled a lot more unpleasant than horse dung; because of the Thestrals' diet, Draco supposed.

Potter looked away, wrinkling his nose, and caught sight of Draco and the others. His face immediately set into a determined expression.

"Malfoy!" He swung away from Granger, who looked up with an expression of annoyance at being interrupted. "I want to talk to you."

Draco's mind raced. _Oh please god not about the staring_.

He raised his eyebrows. "Do you."

Potter came to a stop a couple of feet in front of him. He was frowning fiercely.

"I want to know what you thought you were doing that evening when you threw yourself under the Whomping Willow."

Crabbe and Goyle stared at Draco. He'd somehow never quite got around to telling them about the Whomping Willow incident.

He narrowed his eyes at Potter. "I would have thought that was obvious. Unless you were enjoying yourselves under there? I couldn't say what Gryffindors do for fun."

Potter looked angry. "I _know_ you didn't do it to help us, Malfoy. You have some plan and you did it for a reason of your own that we don't understand."

Draco glared. He'd had enough.

"That would be because you're completely _thick_, Potter. God, what kind of plan do you think I had? Do you think the Dark Lord _wants_ you rescued from trees like a fucking kitten?" Potter tried to say something but Draco didn't let him. "Just _wake up_, would you? My father is in prison. My mother lived in fear of her _life_ all last year, because it was forfeit if I failed. I go to McGonagall every fucking week and ask for a way to help. But _you_ tell the whole school that I'm plotting to kill everybody. You're completely insane!"

Potter's face was red. "Gee, I wonder why I don't trust you, Malfoy?" he sneered. "Couldn't have been because you murdered someone last year, could it?"

"Harry ..." Granger said but Potter ignored her. Draco blinked, though; he'd forgotten there was even anybody else there. Crabbe and Goyle were watching him warily, ready to join in if somebody threw a punch.

He said, very quietly, "I didn't murder anybody."

Potter opened his mouth again and he continued, louder, "I _didn't_. I tried to and yeah, I know that was fucked up and I can't change it but there didn't seem to be much of a choice last year. Nobody's ever told you to kill somebody or watch your mother die, have they, Potter?"

"I did watch my mother die," Potter said, low and dangerous. "I watched my godfather die, too."

Draco demanded, "And if somebody had given you a choice?"

Potter looked at him for a long moment. Then he looked away.

 

Draco realised that he was breathing harshly, as though he'd been running.

"I don't care what you think," he said finally, looking at the Thestral over the other side of the clearing rather than at Potter or his friends. "This is my war too, now. If you don't want me in it, you can go to hell."

Crabbe and Goyle fell into place at his side as he turned and left.

"Draco?" Goyle asked eventually. "We didn't get the toadstools."

Draco snorted; the sound was far too hysterical. "Are you offering to go back?" he asked. Goyle fell silent.

*

He stewed all evening. Obviously he'd known what Potter thought of him, but hearing him say it, so fucking self-righteous and sure of himself, stung him into fury. The other occupants of the Slytherin common room watched him warily and found reasons to go to bed early despite it being Friday night.

Of _course_ Potter had to be right about all things. If _he_ disliked someone, they must be evil. If he liked someone, they had to be good, even if they brought vicious monsters into the school and gave the third years to them.

Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy eventually left him in the common room, still glaring at the fire.

Sometime just after dawn he put the sieve in his bag and traipsed off to the library by himself. Madam Pince raised her eyebrows at him and yawned over her cup of coffee.

He set the sieve down with a thunk on the desk in his favourite corner and scribbled out the If, the one he'd thought of last night.

_If Draco Malfoy chose not to get a Hippogriff put down after it attacked him in third year._

It was probably a long shot but he was running out of ideas. And he had meant to make Potter as well as the half-giant angry over the Hippogriff thing, because he knew Potter was chummy with Hagrid.

He hesitated, staring at the parchment sinking soundlessly into the liquid of the sieve.

There had to be a safe point. That was the theory Draco had been working with. He _knew_ he and Potter could be friends, he'd seen that in the Madam Malkin's If. There were a thousand ways it could fall apart, but ... there had to be a point where they understood each other; where every little thing wouldn't break them into pieces any more. Didn't there?

He bit his lip, blinking away his tiredness, and wished he could make that sound more convincing. Then he reached his wand through the silver rings and touched it to the surface of the sieve.

 

__

If

Bright sunshine made him squint up his eyes as the scene steadied around him. Green lawns swept below him to the giant squid's lake glinting blue and gold. Students were scattered in clumps on the grass, books spread out in lazy and mostly ignored piles around them.

Sieve Draco sat on the grass, leaning against the shady trunk of a tree just a few feet away. Pansy was using his shoulder as a backrest as she sat sideways against him. Crabbe was sprawled out beyond the patch of shade, a frown of concentration directed at what looked like Charms homework, and Goyle was reading a _Martin Miggs_ comic next to him.

They didn't look any younger than Draco was now. It could have been the beginning of this term.

"What on earth ...?" he murmured, looking around. How could the results of a choice made in third year really be best seen in _seventh_ year?

"Draco," Pansy said, staring droopy-eyed down at the heavy book on her knees. "Remind me why I took NEWT level Transfiguration?"

"Because your mother would have disowned you otherwise," Sieve Draco said, not looking up.

Pansy sighed and flopped her head backwards against his shoulder.

"It's ridiculous, though," she said. "Give me _one_ real world example where I would need to transfigure a kitchen chair into a mirror-winged beetle hybrid. It's just not practical."

Sieve Draco twisted to give her a lazy smile. "When you _do_ hit a kitchen chair/mirror-winged beetle emergency, isn't it nice to know you'll be ready?"

She sneered at him.

"Goyle's not studying," she decided. "And NEWTs are ages away. I've had enough."

"I am studying!" Goyle cried, lifting his head. "For Muggle Studies!"

Crabbe snorted.

"They put a comic book on the syllabus?" Draco demanded.

Goyle hesitated. "They should have."

Watcher Draco didn't hear what was said next, because he was staring transfixed at the tall figure walking slowly over the grass towards them. He looked drained and pale, and he held one arm protectively against his chest, but he was ... alive.

Albus Dumbledore nodded twinkle-eyed at the group of Slytherins as he passed them on the lawn.

Watcher Draco gaped at him.

Dumbledore was _alive_. In this If, Snape hadn't killed him for Draco last year. Which meant Snape probably hadn't made that Unbreakable Vow to Draco's mother. Which meant Draco mustn't have promised the Dark Lord he'd kill Dumbledore.

Which could mean _anything_.

"Malfoy."

Draco whipped his head around. He'd been so occupied staring after the Headmaster that he hadn't seen Potter and his friends tramping past the tree Draco and the others were sprawled under. Potter looked down at Draco with dislike.

"Potter," Draco said, getting to his feet. Crabbe and Goyle rose too, in a scramble that left their books on the grass. Watcher Draco saw Weasley glance down at the comic book with a gleam of interest in his eyes.

Pansy very deliberately crossed her legs, adjusted her book, and leaned back against the tree.

"Did you stop here simply to take up space, or did you forget which foot goes next?"

Potter glared at him.

"No, Malfoy. I just wondered if you'd heard from your father recently. You know — your father in _Azkaban_."

Watcher Draco was stung by the viciousness of the question. Potter wasn't usually this randomly cruel — not without some goading.

Crabbe and Goyle cracked their knuckles and moved their feet apart a little so that they looked more hulking. Sieve Draco sneered.

"Actually, I did. He had a very special message for you, Potter. He said to tell you that he'd like you to die in horrible pain, begging like a house elf."

Granger's face tightened. "I'll bet he did."

Draco's eyes swept over her. "How's the house elf liberation going anyway, Granger? I see you've already started dressing like one." He smirked. "Of course, Potter always did. I'll bet you and Dobby share wardrobes, don't you, Potter?"

Potter gave him a hard look.

"What do you care what I wear, Malfoy?"

"Oh, please." Sieve Draco rolled his eyes. "I don't care if you want to wear Rowena's shiny silver tiara, Potter. Just follow my father's advice and go and die somewhere, would you?" He grinned. "The Forbidden Forest is close. Find somewhere nice and dark. Maybe in that nest of acromantulas."

Potter opened his mouth, flushing. Granger grabbed his arm.

"He's not worth it, Harry."

Sieve Draco flopped back onto the grass as they walked away. He looked pleased that he'd got the last good insult in.

Pansy raised her eyebrows. "Rowena's shiny tiara, Draco? That was the best you could do?" The scene began to darken around her voice. "Sometimes I think you two don't think about these little conflicts at all."

*

Draco wobbled, grabbed the desk in the library. He dropped sideways into a chair.

The light was a lot stronger, now. It almost looked like a legitimate time to be up and about.

He gazed around, feeling aimless.

_That's it._ He blinked a few times, slowly. His eyes felt dry and uncomfortable.

He'd been wrong. He'd been sure, but he'd been wrong. He'd seen seven Ifs. Seven possibilities and every time, he and Potter finished as enemies. There was no way to change it.

Part of him rebelled against that, clamoured ideas for new Ifs. It was useless, though; he'd known that for a bit, if he was honest.

Well. He focused on the long window. Outside, the Hogwarts grounds were beginning to wake up, chill and fresh in the early morning.

It wasn't as though he wasn't used to being enemies with Potter. It was as easy as breathing. He could do it on his head.

The whomping willow was swatting idly at something down near the forest. He looked away.

"Malfoy?"

He was slow to locate the voice. Potter. Oh, of course. Obviously there would be Potter.

The other boy pushed his glasses up his nose and stepped closer, out of the shadow of the tall shelves surrounding the desk.

Draco sneered tiredly. "Did you forget something you wanted to say? Have you been lying awake thinking up the perfect comeback?"

Potter flushed. "No. That wasn't it."

He looked tired; almost as tired as Draco, as though he _had_ been lying awake. He had a nervous energy about him, though. He rocked back and forth on his heels as he looked at Draco.

"Um," he said. "I think ... I may have been wrong. A bit. In the forest yesterday."

It took a moment for Draco's sleep-deprived brain to process that.

"What?"

Potter looked away. He was wearing soft sleeping pants and a shirt worn so thin and pale it was almost colourless. It was too big, like all his clothes other than his uniform robes, and it slipped off one of his shoulders. He fiddled with the hem.

"It — you could have been killed that evening, with the willow."

That had occurred to Draco at the time, actually.

"And you're always hanging around McGonagall's office." The words sounded as though they'd been dragged out of him. "So maybe ... I guess you were telling the truth."

Draco blinked at him.

_No._ Some part of him was backing away. _I know how this goes. I can't do it. I can't stand nearly getting there and then watching it all fall apart; not for real._

He shook the thought off.

"And you did really help us," Potter continued quickly. "If we'd tried to break free we probably would have been in the hospital wing for a month. And then we couldn't have gone out and got the Hufflepuff Cu — er, I mean we couldn't have ..."

Draco was a little bit interested despite himself. "I thought I saw Granger carrying a goblet or something that day," he said. "Is that what it was? The Hufflepuff Cup?"

"No," Potter said. "Did I say that? I meant to say something different."

Draco frowned. "Why on earth are you collecting Founder memoribilia, though? Are you trying to spur the Dark Lord into a jealous rage? I remember Father saying that he had an enthusiasm for that sort of thing."

Potter looked torn. "That's not what we're doing," he said. "Honestly. Although if it was, it would be for something like that. To make Voldemort jealous."

Draco raised his eyebrows. "Uh huh." He leaned back in his chair, tilting his head so that he could see Potter properly. "What's next, then? A desperate adventure to capture Salazar's candle holder? Mad hijinks to retrieve Godric's snuggly blanket? A daring jewel heist to sieze Rowena's ... tiara ...?" He paused. "Er. Rowena's tiara?"

Potter fixed him with a narrow look. "Do you know something about the Ravenclaw crown, Malfoy?"

Draco didn't answer. He was trying to remember what his Sieve self had said in that last If; what Sieve Potter had said. _He asked if I'd heard from Father and I said that I had_. He frowned, working it out. _I said Father had a message for him._

And, alright, the message was 'Drop dead,' but still ...

"Malfoy?" Potter peered at him through his glasses, confused now.

Draco waved an arm. "Shush, I'm thinking. Don't try to join in."

Potter made a choked noise. Draco shot him an absent glance and found him biting his lip against what looked like a smile. He ignored it.

_Sieve Draco said that Father had a message for Potter; then he mentioned the tiara. Then he told Potter to go off and die in ..._ He stopped. _My god. I gave him a location. The acromantula nest in the Forbidden Forest._ A message from Lucius, the Ravenclaw Crown and a location. _I am ... completely blind._

He looked up at Potter, slowly. He could feel a wide smile beginning to overtake his face.

"Yes," he said. "I think I do know something about your crown."

"Are you going to tell me what's going on?" For some reason Potter looked as though he didn't mind very much.

Actually he looked as though he was still recovering from the smile. He was blinking and smiling a bit. His hair was messy and in his eyes. It always was; Draco didn't know why he'd noticed it now.

"Later," Draco said. "I think it's breakfast. Don't you think it must be breakfast? I'm starving. I'll tell you all about it afterwards." He stopped, giddy, and grinned. "Well, no, not actually, but I'll tell you the part about Ravenclaw's tiara. And the code. The code was brilliant. That part was probably my idea."

"What?"

"After breakfast," Draco promised. Potter raised his eyesbrows, his gaze lingering on the heavy sieve now pushing the lining of Draco's bag out of shape, but he didn't say a word.

Draco ducked out of the corner the desk was hidden away in, Potter following, and they headed through the large main aisles of the library. It was the first time they'd actually walked together, outside the Ifs. Potter seemed to realise that, too; he looked awkward, unsure of how to hold his arms.

"You know, I had a great uncle on the Black side who collected early Ministry memorabilia. He had this sash of office from the seventeenth century that was designed to strangle any incumbent of impure blood. When I was a kid he used to artfully slip it round my neck every time we went to visit because of this mad theory that there was Veela blood in the Malfoy line."

Potter glanced across at him. "You have the wierdest family, Malfoy."

Draco shrugged. "You should try walking down our family portrait hall. It's total bedlam. My great-great grandparents on the Malfoy-Rosier branch have made a game out of slipping each other shots of poison. It can't kill them because they're portraits but they always go a bit green and faint-looking, and if my great-grandmother's the poisoner she cackles and does this little dance. It's all really disturbing if you're six and seeing it for the first time."

They pushed open the doors to the library and slipped outside. Draco's shoulder brushed Potter's as they settled into step again. Potter darted a look at him and then away, smiling to himself a bit, his cheeks flushed.

Draco felt warmth like sunlight taking over his body as they started down the staircase towards the Great Hall.

All of the other Ifs had ended in himself and Potter hating each other. And maybe one out of seven wasn't the _best_ odds in the world.

But it was enough.


End file.
